


revelling in the darkness of this light

by Mici (noharlembeat), noharlembeat



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood: Lost Days
Genre: Aged-Up everyone, Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Dom/sub, Everyone is of age, Jealousy Kink, League!Jason, Loyalty Kink, M/M, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Politics, Possession Kink, Semi-Public Sex, What-if AU, fudged timelines, not betaed we die like mne, zero underage sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:41:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25814470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici, https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/noharlembeat
Summary: Something strange is happening in Nanda Parbat; there are things brewing. Dick was just sent to pick up some mystery item, but he didn't anticipate a young man who looks like Bruce, or his bodyguard, who is someone he didn't expect.Why couldn't it just be love letters?
Relationships: Jason Todd/Damian Wayne
Comments: 85
Kudos: 368





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Probably four chapters? Maybe five? Keep an eye for tags changing but there should be no archive warnings on this baby. 
> 
> Title is from the Pearl and the Beard's "Dumb Lovers" because I am incapable of titling anything without putting a song but it's a fucking phenomenal song, so. 
> 
> all shifts in tense is on purpose sorry

When Batman said _I need you to go to Nanda Parbat_ , Dick’s reply should have been _no_ , or at least _why can’t you go yourself_? Instead, his answer was _why_ , and Bruce told him that he needed to _pick something up_ , as if the League didn’t have the ability to send things across the world, as if they weren’t a wealthy nation, as if UPS didn’t exist. But fine: he agreed to go, which is why when he lands the Batplane and waits to be escorted off, just like B told him to, wondering if he needs to regret this or just hate every choice that led him to say yes.

First off, it’s cold as balls out there, even though it’s May and back in Gotham they’re celebrating the single week of good weather before the city turns into a muggy steamroom. He could be sitting in a cafe, watching the populace of the city enjoy themselves during the short break between rogue sightings - even the most terrible of rogues, even the _Joker_ , respect the good weather. They hadn’t heard from him since the last time he broke out of Arkham, but at least Dick could rest assured that he probably wouldn’t cause a fuss this week.

Instead he’s staring out at the white landscape, because he was told, firmly, to park the plane looking _away_ from the citadel. Okay. Fine.

Second off, he is still suspect of whatever B wants him to pick up. All that Dick knows is that it’s not a _person_ (thank God) and that it’s something that probably isn’t a weapon. Presumably, that leaves what? Books? An old piece of furniture? Love letters? 

“This better not be me picking up old love letters,” he grumbles as he waits. Ra’s Al Ghul seems determined to not make this easy, because he’s been out here almost an hour, pacing, hungry, and eyeing the shitty protein bars that Tim likes that had been sitting in the Batplane from the last time he used it. They taste like the way white-out smells, and Dick is pretty sure that they contain some kind of weird illegal stimulant, but he’s getting desperate.

He’s picking one up, and he’s about to brave eating it, right when the call comes through his radio to open the doors and come out. He can’t come out just chewing a protein bar - to start off, he’ll be chewing it for at least twenty minutes - and second off, it’s probably rude. 

When he opens the exit, there’s a small group of assassins standing at the base of the plane in formation, and a woman who stands around five foot nothing in a very tall hat. “Master Richard,” she says in a posh British accent, “if you would please come with me,” she adds. Her English is flawless, but Dick isn’t surprised. “The Demon’s Head is not available,” she tells him, “but his heir has agreed to speak to you.”

Dick stutters to a stop as he follows. He knows, in theory, that there is an heir - Bruce has reams of research on him, but there are no photographs, there is almost no information, and they’re pretty sure that he has never come to Gotham or anywhere else in the United States, so Dick hasn’t really paid much attention. His brain starts to churn out facts of what he knows - Bruce suspects he’s a teenager or a child, he’s very, very good at what he does, his kills are clean and perfect, he is definitely _male_ , his mother is Talia Al Ghul, he’s dangerous, he’s dangerous, he’s dangerous.

Dick’s escort turns to him, peering up at his face from under her hat. “There is no alternative,” she informs him, as if she knew what he would ask. “The master is in London, and will not rush home for someone as lowly as merely the adopted son of the Bat.”

“Oh, well, if it’s my station, then of course,” Dick snaps back, even though he knows that Batman wouldn’t like it. He thinks if diplomacy were the key here, they should have sent Tim. 

Big Hat stares back at him, placid. The assassins around them cluster a little closely. The wind howls. “All right, whatever I can do to make this go faster,” Dick finally grumbles, too cold now. Sweet holy Jesus, his balls are practically torpedoing into his body. 

Big Hat nods, and continues to walk. “His highness is occupied until nightfall, but has agreed to see you in the morning. Until then you may stay as his guest, under his care. We have arranged a set of rooms for you. You may find entertainment sparse, compared to the outside world, but there is a library at your disposal. We will, for the safety of his highness, request that you surrender your phone.”

Dick is absolutely not surrendering his phone to anyone. “I can lock it in the plane,” he offers as a compromise, and Big Hat seems to agree to this. They have to stop for a few moments while Dick returns to the plane to leave his phone and get his bag, and then lock up the plane tighter than any vault; Catwoman herself wouldn’t be able to break in. His hopes that he could just go, pick up whatever-it-is and go home are basically non-existent now, which he should have known; Bruce suspected that they would make him wait at least a few days in a show of power. All of this? This is exhausting. The window of Gotham spring is closing, Dick can practically feel it in his bones. 

He returns to where Big Hat is standing, peaceably, as if it isn’t colder than the underside of Dr. Freeze’s helmet out here. “Is there anything else I need to know?”

“I will have an etiquette guide sent to your room, along with dinner,” Big Hat reassures him. Great, Dick thinks. Exciting reading, and no YouTube. This is going to be a long night.

She loads them into a jeep, and he’s squeezed between two assassins as they drive them to the citadel, and it’s true that Dick loves Gotham and all her gothic beauty, he can’t help but stare at the old, unadorned grandeur of this fortress. It’s beautiful in a different way, stark and impossible to look away from. Big Hat has a distinctly smug look on her face when he looks over at her, and he looks away again, back to the changing stone fortress, wondering how it must be to call somewhere like this home.

As if Wayne Manor isn’t nearly as grand; of course it is.

Big Hat turns him over to another person once the Jeep arrives at the gates of the citadel; this one an older man who introduces himself as Novin, and who says he will be Dick’s escort. Dick gets the distinct feeling that Novin could hold his own in a fight with him, that he is more Dick’s guard than his escort, and that he’s being given the runaround for no real coherent reason. He wishes he could call Bruce, but his phone is back on the plane, accruing email notifications and holding the last vestiges of Dick’s sanity in the form of Candy Crush.

Novin guides him through the labyrinthine halls of the citadel; they’re shockingly empty, surprisingly devoid of people. Dick gets that prickling sensation like he’s being watched, though, and he thinks that no, the people are there; this is a living, thriving place, and they’re just avoiding _him_. Avoiding him, or watching him, or maybe both. Novin finally stops at a door and opens it, revealing richly appointed rooms with a view of the mountains and the snow, a luxurious room clearly made for guests, done up in green and black. “I hope this suffices,” he says, with a tone in his voice that suggests that it will hardly matter if it doesn’t.

Dick really wishes he could crush some candy right about now.

It’s a boring night; Dick feels like he’s going to vibrate out of his skin. He eats dinner alone, wanders the few rooms he has, alone, inspects the walls to see if there are bugs or cameras or hiding some peepholes. As it turns out, it seems on the outset that there aren’t, that maybe they did give him privacy, but he knows that Batman doesn’t trust Ra’s and frankly, Dick doesn’t either. As that takes him about an hour, he decides to lay in bed and try and get some sleep. His sleep debt, like Bruce or Tim’s, or even Alfred’s, could probably go down in the annals of history. It’s probably better, then, that he’s given some time to work it off.

And it works; maybe it’s the mix of the mountain air and the hushed, still quiet, the sound absorbed by the snow and his thick blankets, but when he wakes it’s with barely enough time to scarf down some tea and go over his etiquette guide that Novin delivers. The stuff it goes over is easy enough: don’t speak first, don’t address him by name, blah blah blah. Dick tucks it into his back pocket, for all the help that’ll do. It helps that he doesn’t know this guy’s first name.

This is honestly a headache he doesn’t need.

Novin comes to get him, and Dick wants to throw himself out the citadel, run back to the plane, and hop back to Gotham. Frankly, this mission is boring as can be, and if he has to take more than one night of this-

-and then he’s guided around a corner, and the door opens.

Dick doesn’t know what he expected. A throne room, maybe, some kind of huge audience chamber, like this is a fantasy novel and not modern day. This place certainly screams _fantasy novel_ , like the kind that Tim sometimes reads, and Dick sometimes picks up and tries to read before he just gets bored and goes to do something else. He expects, oh. A boy tucked up above simpering crowds, in a throne that dwarfs him, maybe. A boy emperor. Dick knows powerful men, and still, this place with its distrust of the outside world and its old-world sensibilities make him imagine someone who would be handed a scroll and expected to read off it. He knows that Nanda Parbat is one of the most technologically advanced places in the world, but _still_. Couldn’t they just block the signal and give him his phone back?

Anyway.

He imagines a throne room. That is not what he gets. 

Instead it’s a courtyard, open to the sun, with an enormous dome of glass over them. Sunlight is filtering through, giving the impression of being somewhere warm, and tropical, and there’s a group of those same assassins from the day before, only this time they’re in what looks like training uniforms. The courtyard is bustling, with people training, stretching, the occasional fight. There are people yelling, and in the center of it, like the twirling sun that guides it all is a small cluster; five or six warriors, not in uniform, and in the center-

-Dick can’t help but stare for a long, long moment, because God help him, he looks _just_ like Bruce. Not Bruce now, but those pictures that Alfred keeps, of Bruce as a teenager, except not as lanky and not as young. Dick feels like the air has been sucked out of the room and straight through the glass dome, like he can’t _breathe_.

“There,” Novin says. “You may approach him carefully, and respectfully.”

Dick looks back at Novin. “Is this a joke?” he asks, seriously, all traces of real humor exorcised from his voice. “Was there something in the food? The tea?”

Novin’s surprise is so real, his eyes so comically large, that Dick is thrown off-guard. “Sir,” he says, pausing between each word. His English is perfect, intentional, but he’s speaking like maybe Dick is the one who has trouble with the language, here, “do you mean to accuse us of interfering with one of our prince’s guests?”

Dick feels that same taut tension of a grapple hitting a bad spot, of the potential for catastrophe making him fall if he doesn’t do the smart thing _now_. “That,” he says, pointing to the boy who is in the center of the room, who has not noticed him yet, or rather, who has not made any motion that he should approach, “is Ra’s Al Ghul’s grandson?”

Novin’s face has a sheen of sweat and he is nodding, carefully, as if a wrong move might end in his decapitation, and Dick realizes that he is not a warrior, or an assassin. He’s a _servant_. He’s a servant who rose to this station, and now-

God, Dick wishes he was half as smart as Tim right now.

He gets his temper under control, and raises his hands. “Okay,” he tells Novin, and he turns, to finally, finally speak to the single person who can get him out of here. 

As he moves through the courtyard, people are stopping to look at him; Dick knows the feeling of eyes on him from long practice, from memories of a circus. He is skilled at ignoring it, but it still prickles against his skin. 

He’s about ten feet away when the boy - the heir - the _prince_ \- finally looks up, and Dick spends a couple of moments thinking that up close, he doesn’t look identical to Bruce. His skin is several shades darker; his eyes are green. His mouth isn’t as thin, his chin less square, the shape of his eyes a little different. But the Wayne stamp is there in his scowl, in the shape of his nose, in the set of his jaw. He’s in his late teens and he already has Bruce’s height, although he’s leaner, less bulky.

It’s creepy, and it makes Dick feel off-balance. 

Of course, that could be an illusion based on the fact that he’s standing next to a larger man who is most clearly some kind of bodyguard; he’s just as tall but broader, his arms crossed, his face covered with something that looks like an elaborate red muzzle. 

Dick has never genuinely bowed to anyone in his life - not a single human being - without a facetious element to it (or after a performance), and while he’s sure as hell not starting now, the urge is _remarkably_ strong. Maybe they did spike his food. He has to get through this. He has to push this away feeling. He has to get through this meeting and get whatever it is that Bruce wants - love letters? God, he hopes they’re love letters - and get out of here, to try and puzzle out why Bruce has a mini-me in the Himalayans.

Anyway he’s not supposed to speak first, which, boy oh boy, isn’t this fun. 

Boy-who-looks-like-Bruce, whose name Dick _still_ doesn’t _know_ , looks him up, then down, then up again, sizing him up. “My mother’s invitation was not for you,” he says, finally.

“I didn’t know it was your mother who invited Batman,” Dick replies immediately, relieved that the gag order is lifted. “I came at his request,” he adds.

“I am not a fool. I know precisely why you are here,” the boy says. His tone is perfectly controlled, unfathomably modulated, but the team of highly trained assassins around him move in that way that suggest they hear something else in his voice. They are like trained dogs, ears perked to the sound of the hunt.

Dick suddenly deeply wishes he had his escrima with him, that he wore his Nightwing suit instead of this suit that B _insisted_ on. He has always been fine fighting in anything, but this isn’t armor, and he feels terribly naked.

Dick snorts. “Good,” he says, “maybe you can explain it to me.”

There is a long, tense moment, and a scowl that is _definitely_ a Wayne family trait, and Dick just. Smiles. Like everything is fine. Like he’s not going to have to fight his way out of a citadel full of highly trained killers. Like Bruce doesn’t have a lost family member in Nanda Parbat. Like he’s at the circus. 

_Smile, Dickie, because you want the rubes to love you_.

The moment lengthens. The guard with the muzzle tips his head and says something, finally, and Dick feels a shiver of recognition work it’s way up his spine when he hears that voice say something in a language he doesn’t know. Who is that? 

The boy - teenager? Man? Waynebot? - makes a noise that sounds like a mix between a scoff and a click of his tongue, a vague _tt_. “Idiot,” he decides, and, well. It’s not the first time Dick’s been dismissed as a total moron, and it won’t be the last. People treat him like he’s stupid, because he knows how to smile and play into that when it suits him, even as his brain is going a mile a second. “As it happens,” the prince continues, “I am not in agreement with my mother as to the disposal, and so you will, unfortunately, not be leaving here with it, if you leave here at all.”

Why do villains always do this? “Come on,” Dick says, gently. “There was a lot of good faith in coming here,” he points out. He looks up at the glass dome, as if he’s looking skyward to ask God for help, when he’s really judging the distances between platforms and railings and anything else that would give him an advantage to go out upwards. That glass looks thick. Dick imagines bouncing off it and straight back downwards. 

The next part comes so fast that Dick almost can’t follow it. There are people faster than he is, of course there are, and Dick has trained with them, so whatever invisible signal, if there’s a signal at all, isn’t what alerts him. That bodyguard, the big one, the muzzled one, he has a cord around Dick’s ankle so fast that the first thought in Dick’s head is _speedster_ , except-

-except no. The man is on him as he tugs at the same time, but Dick is flexible even in this stupid suit, with extensions that no one really expects out of him. That’s why he can brace himself on the ground, and in a move that spreads his legs wide enough that he’s doing the splits, he kicks the other man in the face.

The muzzle goes flying, and Dick spots his face before he’s tackled to the ground. He’s not sure if it’s the force of the men holding him down, or the shock, or maybe he really was drugged, because while he can accept Bruce’s small doppleganger, this is too much, this is too much-

“Jason,” he breathes, at first, as the prince looks over him, and as _Jason_ looks over him. It’s impossible. There is no air in his lungs. There is no air anywhere in the _room_. It’s _impossible_. Jason’s been dead a decade, Jason’s dead, and yet, “Jason! Jason!” he cries out, and the look on Jason’s face can only be described as disdainful, as he walks away.

~~~~

He was fifteen, when Damian met Jason Todd.

It was not a great secret that Jason Todd was his mother’s finest weapon, honed against the rock of her rage and the whetstone of her ambition. Damian realized that being a woman must have been a challenge beyond reckoning, for the way that his grandfather looks at his daughters and the way his grandfather looks at him. It is comparing looking at the stars with looking at a dog; for all the work and all the devotion she shows, she will never exceed anything more than a faithful hound at his heel.

But his mother was more than just a dog; Damian knew it, and the truth is that his grandfather, he knew it too, he understood it. There was a fundamental difference in perception - what she could be, what she was, and what she would be. Three factors that drove Damian’s grandfather, when Damian was only five, to take over his education, three factors that led to her exile, and to her return, three factors that led, one day, to her sending him a gift, at age fifteen, from where she had been staying in a smaller fort somewhere near Kandahar. 

Birthdays for the Heir of the Demon’s Head were always staid, boring affairs: dinner with his grandfather, and some kind of formal gift presented to him, usually something deadly, beautiful, or both. His mother had not thought to give him anything entertaining in years, not since sending him permission to go into her private rooms to browse his way through her library and choose one book.

(He had chosen War and Peace, for the title, and while he had read it he found it pedantic and not nearly rousing enough to maintain his interest.)

So he was surprised when in the middle of dinner a gong rang signaling the arrival of someone high-ranking, something important enough to interrupt the Demon’s Head and his heir.

Even more surprising was that his grandfather had _allowed_ it.

Damian sat up when he entered the room, looking like the deadliest thing that had ever graced the planet; he moved like the sea should part for him, even wearing the uniform of a low-level assassin. No one Damian had ever seen moved like that, and even when he sat, it was with the understanding that he could get up and kill everyone in this room even from that position.

He _sat_ down. In front of Ra’s Al Ghul and Damian Al Ghul. Without _permission_.

The sheer audacity of it was astounding.

Even more audacious was the look he gave, his eyes bluer than the deepest part of the sea, or the sky in summer. “Your daughter sent me,” he said, in a tone that suggested that even though his uniform gave him no rank whatsoever, that he wasn’t afraid of anything that anyone in Damian’s family might do to him. “To guard him,” he said, pointing, without a moment of hesitation. “As a _birthday gift_ ,” he finished, leaning back into the chair.

Damian felt a scatter of something in the base of his stomach, and he thought it was indignation. He couldn’t stop looking at him.

His grandfather let out a laugh, though, for all that the rest of the servants looked terrified, for all that the other assassins looked unsure. “Grandson,” he said, “this is Jason Todd. He is your mother’s weapon, and now, is seems, he is yours.”

Jason turned that languid, deeply dangerous look at Damian, and Damian feels his face turn a brilliant, fiery scarlet, and he hates it. “Is it loyal?” Damian asked his grandfather, purposely ignoring Jason’s gaze.

“Only if you deserve it,” Jason replied, grinning around a stolen piece of fruit, looking for all the world like he had bitten into blood, his mouth red and ripe. It was like looking at a force of nature, and Damian hated him for it.

~~~~~ 

Damian is furious; Jason can feel it, more than anything. When he met Damian, three years ago, he had already learned to contain most of his emotions, to keep the reigned in tight, but after spending time with him Jason knows when that tension in his shoulders is danger and when that tension in his shoulders is exhaustion. 

Right now he’s screaming his rage in the tension in his back, screaming his rage in the way he’s holding his spine, perfectly straight, that princely posture. Jason wasn’t supposed to show his face; he wears his mask most of the time, because it makes him look more dangerous, because it lets him have whatever expression on his face he wants and no one knows, and because Damian is a jealous creature, destructive in how possessive he is, and Jason _likes_ it. Likes how Damian wants and demands nothing but everything, how Damian gets exactly what he wants and what he wants is every part of Jason for himself.

So after they knock out and haul Dick back to his rooms, and after Jason casually picks up his mask, everyone turning away from looking at him, he walks back to Damian and hands it over. Damian looks at it and then at Jason, and his eyes turn that jade green of pure, restrained fury. Jason just looks back at him, and slowly dips his head, then slowly gets on his knees, and the muzzle is back on his face, fastened there by his prince.

And after that, Damian turns and storms back to his rooms, Jason casually on his heels, right until they’re inside the door of his innermost room and Damian turns, growling. “What was _that_?”

“I didn’t think he would still be so flexible,” Jason says, calmly, leaning back on his door, every bit of his attention focused on Damian. He doesn’t speak in public very often, but there is no voice modulator on his mask, because Damian likes to hear him the way he sounds, not in some modified tone. “That was my mistake,” he adds, a moment later, knowing that admitting it is practically begging for some kind of punishment.

Damian’s temper is spiraling out of his control; Jason thinks he’s never more beautiful than when he gives into the rage, when he no longer looks like his father or his mother. He never looks more like himself than when he’s so angry, or so happy, or so _anything_ that emotion shows on his face or in his eyes. It makes him real, it makes him _Jason’s_ , because for all that Damian is possessive and jealous, Jason is equally tied up in him.

They are two threads, so intertwined that they cannot come apart. 

And he’s enraged now, his eyes so vibrant they almost glow, and he’s trying, desperately, not to yell. “How are you so calm? Don’t you know what this means?” He moves in, crowding Jason in, and Jason can’t help it; he doesn’t look away from his face. “You’re no fool,” Damian snarls, his fingers in Jason’s shirt, tangling there. Any more force and he would shred the fabric.

A year ago, Damian would be looking up at him. This year, Damian hit a growth spurt, and now he looks Jason in the eye; another year and he’ll finish growing, and he might have an inch on him. Maybe more. “I know you’re unbearably hot,” Jason says, smirking under the muzzle.

Damian snarls, and reaches to rip the muzzle off his face, tossing it back into the room. “You are still standing,” he snaps, and uses his not inconsiderable strength to push Jason down to his knees before he walks away, back to his bed, and he sits at the edge of it. He leans back on his hands, his head tipped slightly up, one foot flat on the ground and the other leaning back against the heel. 

He looks like a warlord out of legend, expectant and powerful, he looks like the very portrait of a young god. Jason hates what it does to him, the shiver of power of having the fullness of that expression turned on him, the way it makes his cock rise in his pants without a touch, the way that it makes his mouth dry with desire. He hates it, and he doesn’t hate it at all, because the best part of this is that this isn’t a game, this isn’t some kind of surrender that only lasts for as long as Jason agrees to it.

He belongs to Damian Al Ghul, completely, his loyalty hard won.

He stays on his knees, his eyes fixed on Damian’s, his legs spread. Damian’s rage is cooling into something else, something more delicious. “Remove your shirt,” Damian commands, the heat of his fury a sword edge, now, something that if mishandled could destroy Jason. 

Jason reaches down and he undoes the ties on his shirt, removes it, drops it, and keeps his eyes on Damian’s long legs. If he looks up at him he’ll lose it; he’ll shudder and show weakness. He’s not a teenager anymore, but he thinks sometimes it might make him come in his pants. Shit. _Shit_. He may have started this, but like every sexual encounter they have, Damian is the one running it, Damian is the one in control. How the hell. How the _hell_. 

Damian doesn’t move. “Come here,” he says, his voice dipping low, so soft that Jason has to strain to hear it, and Jason knows better than to stand up. He crawls across the room in a practiced movement, something that should be awkward, but isn’t, his legs set a little wider than usual to account for the erection that is burgeoning between his legs. He stops between Damian’s legs, and settles back on his knees, his hands on his thighs, his eyes on the ground.

It doesn’t last. Damian’s hand is in his hair, tight, and a coil of pleasure unwinds itself down Jason’s spine. A noise that’s halfway between a gasp and a groan echoes around them. “My lord,” he says, as he looks up, and Damian looks down at him. The toe of Damian’s slipper is under his cock, then, pressing his balls up a little. 

Damian isn’t unaffected by this; Jason looks at him and his mouth is slightly open, his pupils giant and black, the green ring of his irises a corona of color, desire clear on his cheeks. “You’re such a slut,” he snarls.

Jason could close his eyes, could look away, but it wouldn’t matter; it’s like looking away after staring at the sun in eclipse. He could close his eyes but he would still see Damian’s face in stark memory behind his eyelids. He keens a little, arching up a little. “Please, my lord, let me suck you off,” he says, because he knows Damian wants to hear it, but more, because it’s true, because he wants it just as badly. If he is a slut, he’s only a slut for his master, and he won’t hesitate to say it.

Damian’s hand moves out of his hair and to his trousers; he opens them himself, drawing his own cock out of them as he lifts his hips only enough to move fabric out of the way. His erection is already wet at the tip, a mess revealing that he’s just as turned on and affected by this as Jason. Jason doesn’t bother to wait, he doesn’t bother to ask for permission again. He presses his mouth against the base of Damian’s cock, and relishes in the sharp intake of breath that follows it. He presses his tongue flat against the underside and licks a long stripe up his dick, and sucks on the sensitive spot on the underside of his cock.

He’s rewarded by a yelp and a moan of pleasure. “You are too good at this, there is no one else’s mouth that would satisfy-” Damian says, and Jason laughs before he swallows him down, the bitter-salty flavor of him flooding his mouth. Jason swallows him down, and Damian moans as he comes down Jason’s throat.

Jason pulls back, smug and satisfied at how _easy_ that was, for all that Damian may call him a slut and a whore, he’s the one who can’t control himself when Jason’s mouth is on him. 

But that smugness doesn’t last, because Damian is hauling him up, putting him on his back on the bed, and reaching over to find something-

-shit-

Damian straddles Jason’s thighs, and leans down to kiss him on the mouth, as his hand goes to palm him through his loose trousers, to trace the shape of his hard cock. “Did you think to distract me,” Damian says, his eyes sharp, “with something as base as your mouth?”

“You like my mouth,” Jason replies, sharp and smart at once, and Damian bites him on the lip in response, making Jason gasp, and then whine sharply as he tugs his trousers come down and something cold comes over his cock and balls. “Ah-” he starts, and he looks down as Damian fastens the cock cage around him. “Shit-” he starts, and Damian grips him by the chin, forcing him to look him in the eye. Jason swallows whatever else he was going to say.

“Yes,” he says. “I like your mouth,” Damian adds a moment later, kissing him again, his tongue lingering against his lower lip for a moment. “But you’re letting your cock do the thinking,” he adds, and pushes away. “I have to clean this mess before my grandfather returns.”

Jason presses his head down against the pillow. He knows that he won’t get anything out of Damian now, and the fact is, he was right, so he gets up on his elbows as Damian gets up and gets dressed. Jason watches him, knowing he won’t get him to finish him off, and now forbidden from doing it himself. Damian turns to look at him, one eyebrow up, gently, “Get dressed,” he says, “we have things to do.”

“Are you going to kill him?” Jason asks, as he puts his trousers back on, grateful that they’re loose enough to hide the cock cage. He’s going to be miserable today, and he knows that Damian thinks he deserves it. Fuck.

Damian looks serious for a moment. “Grandfather would say yes,” he says.

“That’s not what I asked,” Jason replies. “He’s a guest.”

“He knows what I look like,” Damian starts, looking over at Jason, and then he shakes his head. “He knows you’re alive,” he says, and there’s a thread of very real emotion there, a bitter moment of reality.

They both know what that means. Talia was careful for years while Jason was being trained, and then later, when he was her main assassin, for him to not be seen. He lived in his mask when he was outside of her company, or the company of her very trusted servants, and once he came up to Nanda Parbat. As far as it mattered, Jason Todd was dead, deader than dead. The long-forgotten, long-abandoned Robin. 

And now Dick knew.

So.

“Are you going to kill him?” Jason asks again.

The heir to the League, the grandson of the Demon’s Head just looks at his servant, and the fact that they’re lovers means nothing, and it means everything. “If I commanded you to, you would,” Damian says, without a question. “Kill your brother.”

“Yes,” Jason replies, and he knows he would, knows it as surely as he knows the shape of the blade under his hand, as surely as he knows the weight of it and the pressure it would take to drive it into Dickie’s eye. His big brother. His first real hero, really. He was a boy from the East End of Gotham, looking up at the sky, and Batman was too big, too surreal, he was too invasive, but Robin?

Robin would have been perfect. He could have been Robin. He was Robin. He inherited what Dick gave him even if it wasn’t Dick that wanted it, and he loved it, every second of it, every blessed, damned moment of being larger than life. Of being magic, because that was Robin.

He didn’t know, back then, what that would mean. He didn’t know, back then, that it would only take a crowbar and a madman to destroy that magic.

Damian looks at him, and comes in close. “Lower your head, beast of mine,” he says, and Jason obeys, so that Damian can fasten his muzzle back on. His hands linger on Jason’s cheeks. “I will not let them take you,” he says, his thumbs stroking along the line of the mask, right against his cheeks.

Jason feels a moment of warmth, and he presses close, so they’re just against each other, his head against Damian’s shoulder. It is the safest place he has ever been, the safest place he will ever be.


	2. Chapter 2

When Dick comes to, because they knocked him out, they drugged him, of course they did, there is a small white cat asleep on his stomach and a servant girl creeping up towards him. Dick stares at her, and she looks at him, bites her lip, and points at the cat, then presses her finger over her mouth. She looks about seven years old, and she looks so serious that Dick feels absolutely no sense of dread.

She moves quickly and catches the cat, and Dick can’t help but smile as she giggles, and she turns to slip out of the room through a tiny trap door that Dick hadn’t seen before behind a tapestry. 

He gets up and tries to follow her, right when he hears someone speak behind him. “Better not,” Jason says, and Dick spins to see him sitting in a chair, in the dark, his head tipped. Dick’s heart hammers. “She has work to do.”

Dick thought, when he saw Jason, that for sure they had drugged him. Some refined version of the Scarecrow’s fear toxin, clearly, ingested somehow, and it had started with seeing the strange, young version of Bruce and ended with him seeing Jason Todd, dead for a decade, but older, clearly bigger. The last time that Dick had seen Jason, he was shorter than him by several inches and while he was already showing those signs of growth, he wasn’t nearly as big. But it’s him. It’s clearly him, down to the clipped vowels that Jason used to try and hide of his East End accent. 

Oh, thank god, he wasn’t drugged, he thinks, at first, which is a joke, because that means he has a bigger problem. “Jason,” he says, finally. “You’re alive.”

“Surprise,” Jason says a little flatly, and he’s wearing that muzzle still. He unfolds from where he’s sitting. “Glad to see me?”

Dick crosses the space between them, and puts his hands on Jason’s shoulders, and Jason allows it. He’s solid. He’s real. “What happened?” he asks, trying to figure out what to do next. He has to call B. He has to take Jason _home_. “Are they keeping you prisoner? Can you take the mask off? Do you need help? Are you suffering? Blink if you can’t answer, blink twice if you want me to take you home-”

“Jesus Christ, I forgot how much you _talk_ ,” Jason interrupts, and pushes at Dick’s hands. “Shut up for a minute,” he says, and nudges him.

“Are you _joking_ ,” Dick starts, but Jason spins them, to sit Dick in the chair that Jason was sitting in, and he looks down at him. “Jason, you’re _alive_!”

“I am? What a shock!” Jason exclaims facetiously, patting himself down. Dick scowls, and Jason continues, more seriously, “and none of that is important right now.” 

Dick knows what he should ask. He should ask what is important right now, except that he’s extremely distracted by the fact that his little brother, who they thought was dead, is right here, is alive, and he’s-

-he’s dressed like an assassin. He’s the bodyguard of-

“Who are you?” he asks.

“Jason Todd,” Jason responds, like an _asshole_.

Dick wants to kick at him, but he knows that he can’t, because he can’t risk that Jason will disappear to somewhere else in a fit. Jason gives him a tip of the head, and Dick can practically see the sly smirk under that stupid muzzle. “Can you take that off?” Dick asks.

“No,” Jason replies, crossing his arms, and the smirk is in his _voice_.

“You realize how you’re making what should be a really affirming and reassuring reunion really infuriating, right?” Dick snaps, and Jason shrugs a bit. Okay. There are clearly things here happening that Dick doesn’t really understand, and Jason either doesn’t want to answer questions, or he can’t.

Or, the detective part of Dick that sounds way too much like Bruce, he’s not asking the right ones. Jason is quiet, and Dick finally asks. “Who is the prince?”

“That’s not really the right word,” Jason says. “But there isn’t a good translation for his title.” He looks down, and this time, Dick just looks at him, trying to channel that look that makes people crack when Bruce does it. Jason sighs, finally. “He’s Bruce and Talia’s son.”

Dick covers his mouth, because it’s so obvious. Because it makes so much sense. He sinks back into the chair. “Bruce has no idea,” he tells Jason.

“I know,” Jason replies.

“I have to tell him,” Dick says, “I have to tell him about you, too,” he tells him.

Jason takes a step back. “You can’t,” he says. “The only reason you’re alive right now is because Demon’s Head’s secrets are still locked in this citadel.”

Dick thinks he probably knew that. “Damn it,” he says, snapping, “you’re basically telling me that he’s going to kill me or I have to stay here forever? Then why are you telling me anything?”

Jason doesn’t reply, which could mean so much. Dick rubs his mouth. “Okay,” he tries. “What can you tell me?”

Jason turns to the door. “His name is Damian,” he says.

"Like the son of the Devil?" Dick asks before he can think about it, and Jason raises a middle finger as he slips out the door, and disappears.

Dick stares at the closed door. He gets up, and it’s locked, because _of course it’s locked_ , because as Jason clarified, his entire life is at risk if he goes back to Gotham. As if his life is a walk in the flowers. As if his whole life is particularly _safe_.

He looks over at the tapestry that the girl moved, and looks back at the bed. He moves to stuff the bed to make it look like he’s in there, and while Dick realizes it would fool exactly no one, it might delay for a second any wide search for him.

He moves the tapestry and fiddles with the wall until he finds a catch for the trapdoor. He opens it and finds a tiny hall, the kind that doesn’t match the grandeur of the rest of the citadel. It is purely practical, tiny, and has literally nowhere to hide. Servants paths through a place where servants are preferred to be invisible.

So he starts to move. The hallways are more convoluted and more confusing than the ones out there, but every now and again there’s an alcove with a tiny slit in the wall, so he can see what Dick presumes are important rooms.

Okay.

He peers into rooms, one after another. Most of them are empty, or have people he doesn’t know speaking in a language he can’t understand. He doesn’t know what he expected; except maybe the learning of the layout of the place. 

He hears Damian’s voice and he scrambles for an alcove, and finally finds one. It’s an office, or a library, maybe, and Damian is speaking in perfect French to a man who is looking at him like he’s a child. Luckily, Dick actually speaks French, for all that he hasn’t done it in a while. Still.

He stays there a moment, long enough to hear Damian argue that he will be obeyed, and that he speaks with the full authority of the Demon’s Head. The man replies in a tone that is on the edge of respectful, but Dick can hear the irritation in his voice; he agrees. But Dick knows what that agreement means, and Dick can see that Damian does too - this is agreement basically because he has to, and it’s patronizing. 

He wants to stay longer, because he wants to see what Damian does, and he wants to know what happens next, and because that’s _Bruce’s son_. But he hears someone coming and unless he wants to stick to the ceiling in a place where they very likely will hear him, he has to skedaddle back to his room.

He ends up back in his room only a little while later, and he lays in the bed and he has to _think_. There are too many pieces to this puzzle. Bruce got a note, or a message, or god knows, a _tweet_ , from Talia about something that he needed to pick up in Nanda Parbat. He sent Dick. His son is here. Also Jason, his other son, who everyone thought was dead, is alive. But that information is so secret that Bruce’s son might kill him to keep it. 

If Talia wanted Nightwing dead, there were easier ways to accomplish it. She could have sent assassins. Certainly it would have been less convoluted, and Dick isn’t exactly anyone that even the most generous people might say registered high on Talia’s radar. In fact, he’s not even sure she cares he’s alive.

Except now she clearly does. 

So.

If Talia wanted Nightwing dead, she picked a stupid way to do it, and Talia isn’t stupid. Unless the point of this was to get this particular set of secrets back to Bruce, which, then, why wouldn’t she just tell him? Or tell Bruce he was the one who had to come out here?

Dick isn’t a bad detective, but there were too many missing elements here, and too much at stake. If spending a majority of his life taking apart mysteries taught him anything is that the smarter the rogue, the simpler and more elegant the plan. All there are, here, are walls to slam into, a labyrinth that he can only see from an angle that only shows bad turns.

He wants to take his brothers (because Damian is his brother, Damian doesn’t care about him but Dick already considers him his brother) and take them back to Gotham and possibly get Damian some real good therapy, so maybe he doesn’t want to take them to the manor, that bastion of bad mental health practices. 

Okay.

He has to find a way to talk to Jason, again. He has to find a way out of the citadel, and back to the plane. He has to figure out a way to talk to Damian without getting stabbed. 

He stands up, cracks his neck, stretches. Okay.

He’s done the impossible before; he’ll do the impossible again.

~~~~~

“Again,” Jason said, his staff already coming back up from where it had smashed Damian in the side. He moved back into position, his eyes focused on the kid. 

Damian, to his credit, just growled and stood back up, flinging himself, again, against Jason. Jason turned with an economy of movement - that’s what he was going for today, annoy the little asshole with _economy of movement_ , like what used to be done to him when he was Damian’s age - and missed the swipe. “Temper,” Jason said, using his staff to hit Damian’s backside. The kid was good - really good, better than Jason would admit to him - but the more tired he got the angrier he became, and the more it clouded his judgement.

“Stop _talking_ ,” Damian snarled and turned, managing to almost get a hit in, before Jason blocked it with his own staff.

Jason laughed, like this wasn’t strenuous at all; it was, but fuck if he was going to admit it. He had been with Damian for six brutal, agonizing months, dealing with his shitty temper and his entitlement to Jason’s time, his energy, his life. Jason may have chosen this life, but he hadn’t chosen Damian. _Yours is to serve, if you wish to stay_ , Talia had told him, _and I need eyes inside of the citadel_.

He wasn’t supposed to technically train Damian at all. The kid was only his responsibility in the sense that he was some kind of bodyguard (which Damian didn’t need) and some kind of servant (which he _really_ didn’t need) but Damian had seen him training with the other assassins and decided he wanted to learn what Jason knew.

He kept up with him. “Stop thinking,” Jason snapped, dodging the staff at his feet and the staff at his head. 

“Are you ever just silent?” Damian asked, aiming again, and Jason finally grabbed the staff in a move that he knew was unfair, because he was faster than almost anyone else in the League, and used his foot to flip the kid onto the ground, and press him there a moment later with his body weight. Damian had the wherewithal to look offended at this. “Get off me,” he said, using his best command voice. 

Jason couldn’t hide the instinctive pull away, the motion of his body at the sound of the command, but he didn’t do anything more than a jerk. “If you can’t concentrate through me talking, then you’re going to suffer if you ever fight Nightwing,” he said. “Or anyone else outside the League, for that matter.”

God, Jason could still remember the _chatter_. Dick couldn’t shut up if someone knocked all his teeth out and strangled him.

Damian looked sullen and spoiled for a moment. “Again,” he started, but he was quickly cut off by a voice from the door.

“As much as I would consider to see my grandson lose to his guard again,” Ra’s said, slowly and methodically, “You are needed in audience.”

Damian’s face went red so fast that Jason felt bad for him. “Grandfather,” he said, as he pushed at Jason to get off him. Jason obeyed, and gave Ra’s a lazy nod of his head. He was not, he knew, Ra’s Al Ghul’s favorite person in the world, the boy who had the same “gift” of the Lazarus Pit reviving him. They had an understanding, except it wasn’t one of mutual anything.

It was an understanding that Jason’s insubordination was cute and audacious and clever, but mostly it was that Jason kept his mouth shut about the secrets the Pit whispered to them in their sleep. So Jason was allowed to keep breathing. Good enough.

Damian reached for his overcoat, to cover his training clothes, and fastened it as he fell into step, still red, still embarrassed. Damian did not fill the silence with chatter; he filled it with unearned confidence and complete terror, instead. Jason could almost sense it, like another level of warmth in the room, soaked into the walls. In the short time he had been following Damian like a damned dog, he realized that the kid understood the precariousness of being his grandfather’s favorite.

The audience was in one of the actual throne rooms, of which there were _many_. This one doubled as an office, so Jason knew that it was one of the more important generals. The less important the person, the less intimate the conversation, right up until the inverse was true. It was a goddamned bell curve of pretentiousness.

Jason went to the back corner of the room, behind Damian’s right side, close enough that if he were to reach out an arm he might touch him. Of course, he didn’t reach out an arm; he kept his arms close and folded over his chest. A proper assassin, trained here, afraid of Ra’s Al Ghul, would always hold their arms at their sides.

Jason is not a proper assassin, and he’s not intimidated by anyone in Damian’s family. Either side of Damian’s family. He died for that privilege, and he was keeping that.

The general came into the room; he was followed by a small cadre of his men. He was an American, a white man with a clean accent out of Metropolis, and not a single thing to commend him. He looked like what the populace thought Superman looked like, if they had never seen Superman, and if Superman looked consistently constipated.   
He knelt uncomfortably - not League raised, Jason noted, because those bastards knelt like their knees were made for nothing else in the world - and dropped his head. It took a long time; Jason recognized the discomfort in genuflection that came with pride. He muttered something, some stupidly formal nonsense in honor of the Demon’s Head, and then got back up.

“And to me,” Damian said, before anything else.

Ra’s tipped his head, as the room went quiet. General Red-White-and-Blue looked dismissive. “You are not the Demon’s Head yet, boy,” he said, with just that hint of sourness. _Yet_ , he said, as if it would never happen. 

It might never happen, but Jason knew that this was all a power play. Ra’s went purposely and comfortably silent, as the entire room watched this unfold. _Boy_ , he had called him. Mistake.

Jason knows what the guy should have done. What would have satisfied. He could have just nodded his giant ugly head, given Damian the bare minimum, called him by his title, and this meeting would have gone on. Damian didn’t expect full on genuflection.

As it stood, Damian might not be able to kill him, not with his grandfather there (although later was a different story), but it was always a bad idea to fuck with your future boss. 

Damian raised his head. Jason knew he was sore; he knew because they had trained all morning and Jason had literally smacked him around. He knew that under those formal robes were tender bruises, that there were spots where his muscles would rather scream than do what he wanted. 

But he moved anyway. General Idiot saw it coming and moved too, but whatever would have made them evenly matched - and there was a lot, the general had at least a hundred pounds of muscle and a few inches of advantage, a longer reach, years of experience - was quickly shown to be nothing but a farce. Damian had him on the ground in an instant, his foot on the man’s neck.

Jason would never say it, but it was actually kind of impressive. “Let me be clear,” Damian said, his voice low, and dark. “The next time you come here, you greet my grandfather first, and then you appropriately and respectfully touch your face to the floor in greeting to me.” 

General Probably-Pissing-Himself grunted. 

Damian shifted his weight, just barely, only enough that you had to watch closely to notice. But the general noticed. Another pound of pressure and his neck would snap, which would be -

-bad. All of this was bad. But Ra’s was watching like he had released Damian like a hawk to kill a mouse. Jason kept his gaze as neutral as possible. Damian leaned down, just a little, just enough. He didn’t bother to lower his voice when he spoke. “And the next time you call me _boy_ , I will cut your tongue out and feed it to your men.”

And then in a move just as smooth, just as swift, Damian was back at his grandfather’s side, looking as placid and as unfazed as he would if decorum had been followed to the letter.

Jason watched the general as he moved in that same awkward, uncompelling way, to greet Damian with a measure of respect that he knew was extreme, a full genuflection - although not the same bullshit language, still respectful enough - and watched as when he sat up on his heels, his eyes stayed down, the humiliation of being schooled by a teenager burning through him. Jason recognized it, he had seen it before, in Gotham. Grown men used to power don’t take being beaten by schoolboys well.

Jason looked over to where the general’s men were waiting, standing, watching, and he noticed that they looked at Damian with a mix of confusion, awe, and horror. The heir to the Demon’s Head. It was not a secure position by any means, but Damian was the one person who held it for as long as he had, without his grandfather showing any motion to restrain or kill him.

The meeting went on, but Jason wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t until it ended, and it wasn’t until that night when a few of those men came to speak to Damian, privately, in one of his sanctuaries that Jason started to see the way that power flowed inside of the League. Before he thought it was obvious. Ra’s consolidated it, and doled it out.

Now, he wasn’t so sure. These men spoke to Damian as if they understood that Damian would be amassing power. Jason didn’t think Damian was precisely thinking along those lines, but he also didn’t think that Damian wouldn’t, given the opportunity.

“You’ve never threatened to step on my neck,” Jason said, when the last of the men retreated, and all that was left in the sanctuary was Damian, himself, and one of Damian’s cats who liked to curl up in Jason’s lap. 

Damian turned to look at him. “Do you want me to?” he asked, lifting his chin like he was better, or more. Jason was a Prince of Gotham; born to rule in the slums. He recognized power like the kind that Damian was learning to finally wield. 

“You couldn’t if you tried,” Jason snorts, “I wouldn’t let you. But you never tried. I was way more disrespectful than that shit,” he pointed out, switching to English to cuss. It always felt weird to cuss in a different language. The nuance landed wrong.

Damian’s English made him sound like a British schoolboy; everyone in Nanda Parbat who spoke English carried that stamp of British colonialism. Ra’s liked it; Jason thought it was strange. But then Nanda Parbat was never held by anyone but him. What did it matter that he could sound however he wanted? “Your loyalty would not be purchased so cheaply,” he said, “you would have snarled, and I would have had to snap your neck. Where would we be now?”

“You can’t even hit me,” Jason pointed out, stroking Damian’s cat. Everything in the room belonged to him, but not Jason. “I wouldn’t have let you.”

Damian looked at him again, and there was a sudden flicker of uncertainty in his eyes. Nothing made him look less like Bruce, although now Jason was seeing the cracks in that deception; Damian only looked like Bruce for the first few hours you knew him. “Why do you stay with me?” he asked, finally.

“Your mother asked me to,” Jason replied. “Don’t think it has anything to do with you,” he told him, before he got up, unfolded. The cat gave that cat look, like it has always intended on being somewhere that wasn’t Jason’s lap, but also, fuck you.

“Where are you going?” Damian asked, suddenly. “I did not dismiss you.”

Jason tipped his head a little. “Do you think I’m like that general? To be cowed by your position and the way you tip your head, and the way you show your temper? Your foot on my neck?” he scoffed. “My loyalty costs more than that,” he told him, crossing his arms. “I’ll keep you alive, but you don’t have me.”

Damian kept his expression neutral, but his eyes flicked a bit, and Jason knew what it meant. He didn’t like it, but Jason didn’t care.

~~~~

There is very little in this world that Damian hates more than not knowing what to do; than not knowing the next step, the next critical thing, the next action. He doesn’t feel it often anymore, ever since Jason. 

But he feels it now.

He doesn’t know why his mother did this. Why his mother sent the detective a note for him to come pick up Jason’s things, as if Jason’s things would take Jason from him. But now Nightwing - Dick Grayson - is in a guest room, and there is one of his grandfather’s generals is here, saying one of his assassins botched a big job, The kind of botch that means that the assassin will die, but the mess will be bigger to clean than anyone expected.

He knows it’s his job to fix it. He knows he has to be the one to do it, because his grandfather is in London, because he does not want to call him and tell him, because he does not want to risk his grandfather coming back before he decides what to do with Dick Grayson.

This must be a test.

Jason is asleep, curled against him, heavy in Damian’s bed, and Damian is awake, his face against Jason’s chest. He spreads his hand over a bicep, and looks up at him. Here, in the innermost part of Damian’s quarters, the world shouldn’t matter, but it does. 

He knows that it would only take the barest noise to wake Jason up - a breath caught differently, a footstep on the floor. The movement of a tapestry. Damian’s maids are trained in absolute silence, and they wake him.

Damian moves up a little, and presses his nose against Jason’s jaw, and Jason makes a noise that is half pleasure and half question. His cock is still caged, though, so any pleasure is muted, sweet and nothing. “Sleep,” he whispers, and Jason’s eyes open. “I’m right here,” he says, and Jason turns onto his back. Damian waits another moment, until he can hear Jason’s breathing grow heavy again, before he slips out of the bed.

There is silence, and there is silence, and Damian is the latter kind, the kind that doesn’t wake assassins, the kind that is more like the depth of darkness than it is like fog, or mist. He has lived in this citadel his whole life, and he knows where every single step is in the nightingale floor, where he can step to keep that silence. He knows how to slip through the doors so that no air moves, and Jason stays asleep. In the outside antechamber he slips on a pair of loose pants and a cotton shirt, looping it over his head.

The servants are the only ones awake now, the servants and the lowest level of guard, the entire citadel entrusted in their cares, and not a single one of them looks at him. He is omnipresent and invisible.

He goes to where they are keeping Grayson, where Grayson is staying. His guards don’t look at Damian; they pretend he isn’t there at all as he opens the door, the only person in the keep who can.

Grayson is on the desk when he opens the door, half poised to jump onto the ceiling. Damian stares at him for a long moment. “Grayson,” he says, perplexed and maybe a little horrified.

“I don’t know how to refer to you,” Grayson replies, stupidly, and Damian feels this level of disgust rise in him, but Grayson is coming down in a smooth, easy motion. He’s graceful in a way that only the well and truly trained are.

It’s late, and Damian shakes his head. “Sir,” he says.

“Dick is fine,” Grayson says, and Damian feels a buzz of irritation. How can this man be so stupid?

“You can call me _sir_ ,” Damian says, feeling his back stiffening, his spine stacking, one vertebrae on top of the other. 

Grayson does not look impressed, but he doesn’t look dismissive, either. It’s not a look of disrespect, but maybe of uncertainty. He sighs a little. “What can I do for you?” he asks, finally, moving to sit and stopping. “Am I allowed to sit in your presence?”

Grayson is hovering in a move that is practically defying gravity, and Damian wants to say no just to see it last, but he waves a hand, and pulls another chair to sit next to him. Grayson sits, and so does Damian. There is a moment of awkward silence. 

Damian finally breaks it. “You have no idea why you’re here,” he says, as if to confirm.

“Batman sent me,” Grayson replies. “That’s all I know.” The man looks concerned, his eyes bright even in the dark. His eyes are as blue as Jason’s, a little darker, like the darkest part of the sea. 

“Do you have the note? The one my mother sent him?” he asks.

“I don’t think anyone wrote it down. Listen, I don’t know what you know about Batman, but the man started hoarding secrets at age eight and hasn’t exactly stopped,” Grayson replies. 

Damian scowls: this isn’t fair. It’s not fair that this idiot knows his father, and he doesn’t. His mother had promised, one day, and then his grandfather had summarily broken that promise with one of his own: _you may choose to meet him, but you will never return to the League if you do_. Damian had made his choice at age six, and continued to make it, every day. The path of power was not made for the weak or suggestible. “You would do anything for him?” he asks, finally, curious. “Even a mission leading to your death?”

Grayson closes his eyes; his estimation in Damian’s mind sinks at least three places. Who closes their eyes in front of an assassin? A fool. “Well,” Grayson says, “It’s not like it would be the first time.”

That does not make Damian feel any better.

He clears his throat a little. “I assume my mother thought that your arrival would spark curiosity in me,” he tells Grayson, finally. He doesn’t usually speak like this, not to strangers, not to someone who is a real and complete threat. “But I do not know for certain.”

It’s late, and he’s trying to puzzle this out. Grayson likely won’t leave here; his grandfather is returning in days now, and it’s unlikely that he’ll let the man survive to take this information back to the Bat. So. Damian might as well use him for all he’s good for. 

The idea has been sizzling in the back of his head. “Do you know who I am?” he asks, suddenly.

Grayson looks at him with those perplexingly blue eyes. “Yes,” he replies, finally. “I know who you are.”

Damian lifts his entire body, as if he’s trying to intimidate him. “What is my father like?” he asks, finally. It’s a question he could ask Jason; Jason knows the answer. But he doesn’t want to know from Jason, who is his creature, he doesn’t want to know from Jason, who makes his entire body seize up with desire, sometimes. He doesn’t want to know if Jason’s tendency to be kind to the servants, to tease the little maids until they giggle and tug on the end of his shirt for more attention, if his capacity for kindness comes from Damian’s father. He doesn’t want to know if the dangerous, deadly parts of Jason’s personality are all just rot that his mother put there.

Grayson softens, and Damian doesn’t think he can stand it, the way that there is something too close to pity on his face. “He’s a good man,” Grayson finally says. “A hard man, though. He likes his secrets, and he keeps to a code,” he explains. He pauses, like he’s thinking about it, and Damian feels the line of his spine curve, a little. His shoulders press in. Grayson continues. “His favorite time of day is in the very early morning, just as the sun is rising. At the end of a really long night, if he gets what he wants, he’ll sit at the highest point in Gotham and watch the sun rise over the skyscrapers. Uh. He likes kids, even though he doesn’t have time for them, not really. He’s not really good with people, but he’s good at pretending.”

Damian feels like his heart is being slowly carved out of his chest. He only really wants to know one thing, but it’s the one thing he won’t ask and he’s pretty sure it’s also something that Grayson won’t say. “What does he want?” Damian asks, instead.

“To rid Gotham of crime. To make the city safe for normal people,” he replies. “To make the world safe for people.”

“You know we seek that as well,” Damian says, “but he would not agree with our methods, would he?”

Grayson leans back in his chair. “You kidnap and kill people.” 

“We do not kidnap often,” he says. “You are a unique case.”

“I wasn’t talking about me,” Grayson replies, and Damian stands up, furious. 

The rage is white-hot, then, because he knew it was coming. It almost covers his eyes, hides his vision, makes him see nothing but red. Jason is his. He feels a distant pain in his hand, and he knows he shredded the skin of his hand with his nails, and he does not care. “Careful,” Damian says, finding some modicum, some tiny sliver of control. It is the way his nails dig into his skin. It is the way his hands do not go to the knife at his belt.

To his credit, Grayson is careful. To his credit, Grayson speaks with something that is close to respect now, even though the words are not respectful at all. “You should let him come home with me.”

Home.

Home, he says, as if Jason’s home is not in the center of Damian’s soul, as if Jason’s home is not here, in Damian’s bed. As anyone cares for him, as if anyone understands the force of nature he is, and as if anyone else will have his loyalty like Damian does. As if anyone deserves it. Home, he says. 

Damian does not know what it is like to go into the Lazarus Pit, but he knows that sometimes there is a rage that burns through everyone who goes in, like the pain of everyone who has ever died for the survival of the one chosen. He has seen it in Jason. He thinks that if the rage he feels now is even a quarter of what that feels like, he does not know how Jason has not destroyed the world in his fury, because he thinks this could power a bomb.

He wants Grayson _gone_. He could kill him - he could use Jason, he could have _Jason_ do it, and he would deserve it, but-

-no.

There is a better way, a cleaner solution. 

He lifts his chin. “I have a meeting in the morning, but in the afternoon, I will give you what you came here for,” he says, cold as ice, that rage burning in his stomach. 

“Wait,” Grayson starts, but Damian is already out the door, and when he steps out he walks right into Jason.

Jason woke up, realized Damian wasn’t there, and knew exactly where he would go. He’s barefaced, but it’s dark here, and Damian finds that at this moment, he doesn’t care. “You-” he starts, and he grabs him, kisses him on the mouth. 

“Dami-” Jason starts, but Damian kisses him again, and feels that knot of rage unspool in his belly, as if Jason absorbs it through his skin. His fingers are digging into Jason’s forearms, and he’s turning him to press him against the wall.

Jason makes a noise, tiny, a noise that even Damian can barely hear. “Not a sound,” he commands, against Jason’s ear, and Jason dips his head for the kind of kiss that burns them both, desperate, as Damian reaches between them to tug fabric out of the way. He manages to get Jason’s trousers down around his thighs, and his own only down enough that his cock is out, the waistband tucked up under his balls.

He can see that Jason is already responding, for all that the cage probably is uncomfortable, and Damian actually smiles a little, pleased, satisfied. He may not be in his mask, but here is proof that Jason knows his place. “I shouldn’t,” he says, smug, a finger tracing down a line of the cage, to the base.

“As you prefer,” Jason mutters, barely. He could have said _do what you want_ , but the formality of the wording is appealing on its own. Damian likes formalities; that alone makes him want Jason even more.

He reaches down with both hands and takes the cage off, and Jason’s erection is in his hand barely a moment later, the cage in his pocket.

Jason doesn’t make a sound, every noise swallowed between them, as Damian strokes him, strokes them both, his hand fitting around the both of them like it fits around the handle of his sword. His other hand presses against Jason’s belly, to keep him pushed back. 

Damian uses the slick from Jason’s cock, already hard in his hand, hard without almost any encouragement, and the slick from his own, dripping over his fingers and slipping over their erections. He strokes and kisses him and bites. He looks up that bare half inch between them and Jason is looking at him with those wide blue eyes, like Damian set the sky and stars in motion. There’s worship there and it goes straight to his cock, makes him open his mouth and let out a sigh that in any other locale would be a moan.

Jason moves his hand down, to tangle their fingers together, and that makes Damian gasp again as their hands move together. He brings his other hand to his mouth, to suck his fingers, and then he feeds them to Jason.

Jason’s tongue curls around his fingers, slipping over his calluses, and Damian’s hips jerk in response to it, his breath stuttering in time. 

The word _now_ hangs between them, caught in breath and coiled in the seconds it takes for him to reach behind Jason, and presses them into him.

The motion that Jason makes, the sinuous twist of his entire body, that’s better than any noise, than any moan. His eyes flutter closed, and Damian kisses him on the chin, on the throat, and his teeth sinks against the flesh of his earlobe, and Jason comes with a stutter of his hips. 

Before Damian says a word he’s on his knees, taking Damian’s erection into his mouth and down his throat, and that mouth, wicked, works in an act of absolute worship.

It doesn’t take much, but when Jason’s mouth is involved, it never takes much.

Jason looks up at him from that position, and leans his forehead against Damian’s thigh. Damian runs a hand through his pretty curls, which even flat and oddly shaped from sleep coil around Damian’s fingers like every part of Jason understands he’s owned.

He moves back a little, and Jason tucks him back in, before he tugs his own trousers up. The rage has soaked away now, slipped away now.

They’re alone, and they’re both silent, invisible, so Jason tucks their hands together, fingers tied up.

Damian can breathe again. 

He’ll give Grayson what he wants tomorrow, and then Grayson will understand that Jason will not leave, that he will always consider Damian home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> god forgive me this idfic
> 
> but I'm not really sorry about it


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning Dick wakes up with the kind of hangover that doesn’t come from drink, but from sheer exhaustion. He feels the pressure behind his eyes, because even though he slept, he slept the sleep of the deeply paranoid, the sleep of someone who is convinced that an assassin is coming in the night.

Well.

Another assassin.

Damian Al Ghul is not to be messed with. Dick’s only advantage is that Damian, no matter how much he hides his emotions, wears his rage the same way that Bruce does, and last night he gave a look that Dick had only ever seen on Bruce’s face when he was looking at the Joker.

So the advantage is that he knows that he might die, which is barely an advantage at all. In another scenario, Dick would have left. In another scenario, Dick would have found a way out through the window, through the floor, through the ceiling. By following a servant, by knocking out his guard. They’re all trained assassins but Dick is Nightwing, he’s not exactly a civilian.

But he won’t leave without his brothers. Of course, convincing his majesty, prince of heaven and earth and lord commander of an army of killers might take some work, but Dick is up for it, provided he live through today.

That cat is back, asleep curled up in Dick’s bed as he gets dressed. He gives it a scratch on the head, and it makes that little chirrup noise cats make when they’re a little surprised. There’s a package of clothes, because Novin asked if Dick needed some, and so he finds himself dressed in a pair of trousers and a shirt that makes him look like a League Assassin, except it’s in a shade of blue that is just a little lighter than Nightwing blue.

It’s the color of his own eyes. Poetic. Remarkably thoughtful.

He stretches, just a little, and he feels the range of motion; it’s better than the stupid suit he tried wearing his first day here, just two days ago. They’re so comfortable that he kind of thinks he could wear something like his back home, even if it did attract attention. Who cares?

Again: presuming he lives through today.

He paces a bit; at some point Novin comes to get him, and out of something resembling pity, shows him to a stark but effective training room. Dick is grateful for the chance to get all the anxiety out, even though there are at least four guards he can see and probably twice that where he can’t. Maybe Jason will impart “how to come back from the dead” before Damian kills him.

Wow, he really is loopy. Maybe it’s the altitude. 

He keeps training; easy, familiar routines, and wonders what Bruce will do. Mourn? Come after him? None of that is probably in Damian’s calculations. The kid said he’d give him what he came for (still a mystery) but then what? He’s also made it clear he can’t leave.

Is Dick too optimistic to hope this ends with an non-disclosure agreement? _On penalty of death or lawsuit_. Ha. Bruce might show up at the citadel, but Damian and Jason are both assassins. They have more than enough skill and resource to evade Batman. The Gotham spring is narrowing by the second - the moment it gets muggy, another rogue will attack, and Batman’s attention will go back to his city.

Novin comes to fetch him early in the afternoon; he doesn’t bother, anymore, with any of Damian’s titles, as if he’s been told the jig is up, that Dick has zero respect for them, or something else. This time, he’s led, not to a training room, but to the throne room he thought he would be led to initially. Honestly, he thinks, all of this? All of this is a show of power. _Watch me make you wait, look at my fancy throne room_. For heaven’s sake, there’s a dais in the middle. 

And Damian is there. He’s wearing a uniform of black lined in green, and it highlights his eyes. He practically screams money in that understated way that Dick knows only people whose great grandparents were born with money can manage. The kind of people who think that if anyone in the past three generations wasn’t rich, that money is new. It’s all so sleek, but Dick has been around rich people all his life.

It takes more than that to impress him.

The throne in the center - the big one - that one is empty, but Damian is sitting in the one directly to the right, and he looks annoyed. “First meeting didn’t work out?” Dick asks, because hell.

If he’s going to die, he’s at least going out big.

Damian holds himself like he’s made of steel. Dick has never seen anyone look so constipated with power, not even Lex Luthor. This kid is either _furious_ or he’s _terrified_ , or maybe both.

Of course, Jason is there, a few steps back, that stupid weird muzzle on his face, his hands at his sides. “You have no sense of self-preservation,” Damian says, “none at all.”

“Oh, I have some,” Dick replies, “But you learn to ignore that annoying voice that says _shut up_ when you start doing my job as young as I did.”

Damian leans forward a little at that; it’s so obvious, so brutally clear that he wants to know more that it breaks Dick’s heart a little. “Has he taken another child, then? To raise as his own, to abuse for his own ends? And you will still judge us?”

“We all chose it,” Dick snaps back, and he looks at Jason.

Damian almost stands. “Eyes on me, I am the one who makes the decisions here.”

It takes all of Dick’s considerable willpower to not use the Captain Phillips line. _I’m the Captain now_.

Dick looks back at Damian, then. “And what decision are you going to make today, then? Are you going to kill me, or let me go?”

Damian says something, sharp, and a pair of servants comes out of a side door, carrying a small table. On the table is sizeable box made of dark black stone, and there is a seal at the top of it, like a lock.

Dick puts his hands on top, or at least, that’s the motion he makes, but before his hands can get within an inch of the box, Damian barks again, and it makes Dick freeze, and look up, surprised as Jason comes down the dais with a walk that Dick knows he didn’t learn from Bruce. He looks like murder. Like death.

He stops on the other side of the box, and takes a pendant, heavy and made of the same stone, from where it hands adorning the sash around his waist. He places it on the seal at the top of the box, and Dick gets it-

-it’s the key, to the lock. There’s a click, and Jason opens the box, removing the lid. Dick looks at Jason. He can’t see his face, but he can see his eyes, that impossible blue color. Like Bruce hand picked them for that. 

He looks at Dick, and it’s like looking at his baby brother again, that little boy that Dick didn’t treat as well as he should have, that foul-mouthed, smart kid who Bruce loved so much his death killed him too. He’s looking at Dick with that same tension in his eyes, furious, and that same _fear_. Robin looking at Nightwing. Jason Todd looking at Dick Grayson.

Dick looks down. His eyes flick down, at first, then up, then down again. It takes him a second to realize what he’s looking at, as if his brain just can’t process it. Green, and white, and red, and sunken spots where eyes should be, and a slit where a mouth should be, and it’s all some fluid.

Dick reels back. “Is that-” he starts, and then looks at Jason. Jason’s rage, and terror, now looks like complete shame. Or maybe that’s projection. “Is that the _Joker’s head_?”

He looks up at Damian, who is watching this with the regal audacity of a child emperor. “That is what you have been sent to pick up. The lock can only be undone by the key of the assassin who delivered it to the Demon’s Head, and now that assassin is giving it to you.”

He looks at Jason. “You killed the Joker?” He tries to think; the last time they heard about the Joker was months ago, almost a year. Maybe more? Jesus, he had gotten out of Arkham somehow, there was a break in, and then he disappeared. Batman and Robin were both on it, and they told Nightwing, but it was just so _quiet_. Batman didn’t like it. It made him nervous, when the Joker didn’t do anything, when he just vanished like that for so long.

But time passed and no one had word and maybe Dick had let it slide, because it was just so much easier. There were other things to worry about. A week later Batman had to go handle some League stuff, the week after that there was a shipment of drugs they had to handle, the week after, who the hell knew. He knew that eventually they’d see him again, and there was guilt in how much easier things were without having to worry about him every day. 

Jason doesn’t respond. He doesn’t, for all intents and purposes, seem like he heard anything. “Jay,” he starts. “Jaybird,” he tries again. 

He looks down at the box, and then back at Damian. Damian’s face is now impossible to read, and Jason is making his way back up the dais. He stops, and kneels in front of Damian, and bows his head.

Dick stares down at the box. “Jason,” he starts, “I don’t-” he tries, but then he can’t, because the box is being lifted and placed in his arms. It’s lighter than it looks, and Dick looks back down at the Joker’s face, not smiling, his nose smashed in, perfectly preserved.

When he looks back up, Damian and Jason are gone.

~~~~~

There was a labyrinth in the base of the citadel, deep in the mountain.

It was used almost exclusively for training. Damian didn’t pay much attention to it; it was used for children to learn how to navigate spaces like that, winding corridors and strange spaces, in the dark, in smoke. He had not been down there since he was a child. 

But he knew it was there, and that was where he was taking Jason.

Jason was waiting in at the top of the stairs when Damian arrived, and he looked both bored and irritated. “Why are we here?” he asked, and looked down the bare inch of difference between them. In the past year Damian had grown, and in the past year Damian had spent more time than he was willing to admit that he was trying to find a way to get Jason to stop looking down at him like he was a child.

He was not a child. He was an adult by the standards of the League, and he had been a killer for so long, he forgot what it was like to not have blood dripping between his fingers.

Jason infuriated him; every action was one of dismissal, but for reasons he did not understand, Damian could not send him away. He woke with Jason outside his room, and he bore Jason’s bad manners and worse attitude, and he could not change him. Every single day was another day of Jason not caring about Damian. Another day of his loyalty being tied to his mother. 

Jason would be forever someone who did as he pleased, and so his loyalty had to be given as freely.

Damian had his own men. Damian had his own troops, now, but he could not sway this single blue-eyed, dangerous man. Damian earned the loyalty of greater men than some low-level assassin, but Jason Todd was starting to invade his dreams, and it was intolerable. It was unfathomable.

He refused.

When Jason spoke up, he felt his spine go rigid. “I have gotten you something,” he said.

Jason looked over at Damian, and then at the door that led down to the labyrinth. Damian could see the gears turn in his head, the way they ticked and turned and spun. “What’s down there?” he asked.

Damian looked at him, at this dangerous man who refused to trust him. “Proof of my loyalty,” he said. “If you go down in there, and come back out, either you will kneel at my feet, or I will let you go and tell my mother I lost you,” he said. “You may choose to not go in, but if you do, nothing will change between us.”

That wasn’t true, strictly - if he did not go in, Damian was entirely prepared to kill him. He would not have someone stay with him who did not wish to be there, he decided, out of loyalty to someone else. It was an intolerable lack of respect. 

Jason had a calculating expression on his face. Damian knew that there were other things that called Jason; Gotham, and revenge, but they were things that ranked below his mother’s esteem. Jason still felt a debt to Talia, and Damian knew he had only spent a bulk of two years with her son out of obligation. 

Well.

Damian refused to allow that to continue. Jason looked at Damian again, and Damian nodded, and turned away to go to the room that oversaw the labyrinth; cameras with viewpoints to every corridor, to every single twist and turn.

The labyrinth was not particularly challenging for anyone with training, but Jason stayed at the top of the stairs for a long measure of time; Damian watched that, too, as he considered if it was worth it, if this was worth it. Finally Jason started down the long stairs. The guard at the entrance nodded, and then handed Jason a weapon - in this case, a crowbar - and moved aside.

He moved quickly, without regard for traps (not disabled but easy detected) or fear of the dark or the smoke, right until-

-Damian had not planned for the victim to start a terrible screaming-cackle. That would have been too much. When he had arranged to get the Joker out of Gotham, and offered him a prize of both money and mayhem to come to Nanda Parbat and meet with Damian, he had not precisely told him the nature of being kept in a labyrinth. The Joker had spent, from what Damian saw, nearly a day just casually attempting to get out of the restraints they put him in. 

Damian had planned on that. On an unrestrained Joker, because if Jason could not face the man standing before him, he did not want his loyalty anyway.

Jason stopped and looked up, then, and his body language changed. He stopped moving fast. He slipped back into a corner, and Damian tried to get a better view, but Jason’s luck was that it was one of the few blind spots in the labyrinth. 

The scream-laugh came again, a desperate cackle. Garbled words - Damian thought he heard some cry out, _I love games_.

Damian watched. He watched as Jason got his courage back, or at least developed a plan of attack. He watched as Jason stalked the Joker through the labyrinth. He watched as Jason took his time when he found him. He watched as the Joker didn’t know who he was looking at, as Jason spoke to him, as the Joker _recognized_ him, and he watched as the Joker taunted him. _Little dead bird_ , he called him, _little zombie bird_ , and then _little living bird_. _Wanna hear a joke about what happens when the dead don’t stay dead_?. The Joker’s laughs continued until they didn’t; they continued until they turned into screams.

Little bird, he called him. Little bird. _Rocking Robin, tweet, tweet, tweet._

Damian watched, unflinching, as Jason beat him, as he took his blade he always wore and sliced him open, as he killed him. He watched as Jason spat on the body, watched as he picked up the corpse by the shirt, watched him drag it back. 

And then he stopped watching. 

He waited, instead, arms folded over his chest, standing at the door. The guard was dismissed; he wasn’t there for any reason beyond making sure the clown stayed inside. He stood there as Jason came out of the labyrinth, dragging the bloody corpse of the Joker behind him.

Jason looked at him, then, and dropped the body between them. “No one killed him,” he said, even though they both knew that was true, just moments ago. “No one avenged me.”

Damian lifted his head. “It would have meant less,” Damian pointed out, “if I did the job for you. You are worth more than a clean kill without a moment of recognition. You are worth him knowing that yours was the hand that held the sword.”

Jason looked at Damian for a long moment, and then down at the clown. “No one has ever given me anything like this,” he admitted. A boy from a poor family, Damian knew, and he knew this too: his mother trained him and his father trained him and they gave him a place to live and riches to line his pockets, and comfort, and food. But no one looked clearly into Jason Todd’s soul and wondered what he could have wanted.

Damian did.

Damian knew the value of revenge, the value of having that revenge recognized, having that revenge served on a beautiful platter. He knew the value of making your enemies stare you down while you defeated them. He knew what it meant to be a boy who was not a threat, and to then be seen as the terror in the dark.

Damian uncrossed his arms. “Take his head, and you may leave the rest to rot.”

Jason looked at him again, after looking down at the body in front of him. There were words there, between them, but Damian knew the shape of them, now. A man, forgotten, his vengeance consistently taken away, and no one to care for him enough to give him the closure he needed. “I trust this has given you something more than an afternoon’s distraction, Todd.”

Jason looked at Damian again, dazed. Finally, Damian sighed. “I am the only one in the world who cared enough to give you what you _needed_.”

“I can see that,” Jason snapped back, and he swayed a bit. “How didn’t I know that before?” he asked.

“Well,” Damian snipped, “clearly, your judgement was clouded by your rage. Now you can see clearly, and you can decide who you will follow. I told you when you went into that labyrinth that you would come out, and you would either kneel at my feet, or I would let you go.”

Jason swayed again, and then stepped over the Joker’s body, so there was almost no space between them. And then he kneeled, one knee, and then the other.

And he folded, while his hands reached up and caught the end of Damian’s tunic, his forehead at Damian’s feet. There was blood there, but Damian was born of blood, was designed for blood. He did not take offense. He did not find it disturbing.

Damian took that moment to lower himself, then. So he could make Jason look at him, his hand on Jason’s chin. His eyes were bluer than usual, from the red contrast. “My beast,” he said, smug, finally. “Have I earned your loyalty?”

Jason was gasping like he was coming back to life, breath after breath. Or maybe like he was being born. “Yes,” he shuddered, and snarled. “Yes.”

Damian stood. “Then take the head, and leave the body to rot. We have other things to see to, today.”

It was not the first time that Jason had followed him after an order, but it was the first time that it mattered.

~~~~

The kitchens were one of Jason’s secret, favorite places, and he comes down here to get a breather sometimes. Damian is in a meeting with his grandfather, over comms, and while Jason could stay - he knows everything that happens, and Damian isn’t particularly shy about his privacy when it comes to Jason, he sometimes doesn’t, because it’s usually boring as hell. 

Damian doesn’t always like it, and today especially he made a fuss, but Jason slipped out anyway.

Right now, he’s playing a game with one of the maids.

The funny thing about life here is that it is, and it isn’t, like life in Gotham. Sure, it’s a lot of ruling from above, a lot of politics and machinations. A lot of assholery. But life moves on. People here have things like spouses and children and jobs. For all that he imagined that everything up here was just a military stronghold, that absolutely isn’t true.

The thing Jason likes the most is that the kids - every single one of them - actually have childhoods, compared to his own. Okay, Damian didn’t, but Damian is actually an odd case. Even when they’re training to be assassins, or servants, or politicians, or academics, they are playing at it like children are meant to.

When he first arrived all the kids were afraid of him, but he likes kids, even though he rarely knows how to treat them. They avoided him until he started to pick on them, to tease them a little. Now they do this.

She’s trying to sneak up on him. It’s pretty essential that the servants here are just as silent as the assassins; both Damian and Ra’s are notoriously light sleepers, and both are easily irritated with even the lightest sounds, but it keeps everything running smoothly, too. She’s playing a game, and she’s practicing a skill, and the thing is that she’s good at it.

But she’s only seven, so of course Jason is better. He’s sitting at the long table that the servants take most of their meals at, his mask on the table next to him, cutting a piece of fruit while she moves, inch by silent inch.

He takes a piece of fruit, raises it to his mouth-

-and she gives away the game by thinking it’s the prime moment to jump. He turns and catches her, and she bursts into giggles and shrieks the name they call him, over and over, as he turns her around the room a moment. “Try again,” he tells her, and sets her down next to him. “But not now. Do you want some?” he asks, offering her a slice of orange.

She takes it in both hands with a proper chirped, “thank you.” They do that. Talk to him like he’s halfway between a servant like them, and a general of Damian’s men. Polite, and mannered, even as she leans against him and hides her face in his arm, her orange in her mouth. A sweet burst of sunshine. He remembers being little, and stealing a piece of fresh fruit and running with it, devouring it behind a trash can.

He goes back to peeling, her little body leaning against his arm, and is about to eat one when they hear something at the same time. She scrambles - she probably thinks it’s her mother, and she has chores, but Jason knows better.

She screams and it’s instinct that makes Jason turn, and stand in front of her, a blade in hand. Dick holds both hands up. “Sorry,” he says, and Jason knew that this would happen, at some point. “Sorry,” he repeats, looking down around to where the little maid is clutching the back of Jason’s tunic. 

Jason feels the instinct recede a bit. Even knowing it was Dick, it’s hard to deny that first desperate desire to protect someone. Shit.

He puts his blade away, and then turns. “Go,” he says, a little gruff. “Take your orange,” he adds, and she keeps a lingering eye on Jason, and then she hurries off. Shit.

Dick comes closer, now, and Jason sits back down. Dick is moving like Jason is a scorpion, something venomous and dangerous that as long as he’s careful, he can approach without being stung. He’s not right on that regard. Jason is far more dangerous than a creature whose instinct is to sting and run. “That was kind of cute, you know.” He clears his throat. “I watched her stalk you for a little bit, and watched you catch her.”

“I’m fucking adorable, Dickweed,” Jason snaps back. It’s been a long time since he and Dick went at it, but it feels familiar. Like stepping into an old skin. It’s a dangerous game to play, that familiarity. He knows if he plays it too well, they’ll both suffer for it.

Dick more than Jason, but still. “Why didn’t you tell me, the first night you came? That you killed the Joker?”

Jason feels his jaw tighten a little, as if his body knows better than to let the words tumble out of his mouth. Damian did that for him, Damian gave him that. He thought, when he chose to come here at Talia’s request, that he would never get closure for that. He knew the Joker was alive, he knew that Bruce didn’t do anything to avenge his son. 

But then Damian did that. Damian found him, and Damian brought him there, and _Damian_ gave him that weapon, turned him into that weapon, and did it for nothing more than _Jason_. Told him, after. _You can either kneel or you can leave_.

Damian did what no one else in his family had the balls to do; he gave Jason back _everything_ , and still _asked for nothing_.

So Jason had to give him everything, too.

But that was intimate. More intimate than sex, more intimate than the battered feelings tumbling in the base of Jason’s ribcage, like a monster that could eat him whole. So.

“Does it make you look at me differently?” he asks, trying to steer the topic to something less volatile. Something less likely to make his heart stammer shut. 

Dick, to his credit, kept looking at Jason with that same careful expression. “No,” he said, finally. “Little Wing,” he said, finally, and the old nickname battered on Jason’s defenses more strongly than he would have liked. “You know B’s code, and I know it, but if anyone deserved it,” he starts. Stops. “I thought about it. I thought about it, about you. About what you deserved. You’re my little _brother_.” He presses his hand in his hair. “I’m sorry that we didn’t do it for you.”

Jason looks over, careful, like if he looks at Dick face on, every single secret he has will come tumbling out. It’s a stupid worry; Jason is a fortress for secrets. They could bury him with enough secrets to fill the vacuum of space. But Dick presses on. “But that’s not why I’m here, is it?”

Jason feels a panic in the base of his stomach, then. Dick isn’t the best detective in this family, but that’s like not being the best at catching mice in a family of barn cats. It’s not to say he’s not good at it. “B made it sound like it was something else. We both know if this was what he thought, if he knew, he would have come himself. If he knew it was _you_ , he would have-”

“B doesn’t give a shit about me,” Jason tries, but the lie sits _really badly_ on his tongue. 

Dick snorts. “That’s not true,” he says. “He built you a memorial!”

“He replaced me,” Jason counters, although-

-although maybe he would have wanted it, eventually. To be replaced. Not like this, not dead and replaced, but like Dick. Another boy, another Robin. How long would he have fit that anyway? He wasn’t ready to give it up at fifteen, but maybe at eighteen, maybe then. Jason would have found something else. He wasn’t like Dick, leading his own team, he wasn’t like Dick at all. But he could have been something more than Robin.

Some grasping, greedy part of him wants to forget this. Forget this entire conversation, forget this plan, to take his well of secrets and go back to Damian and have a conversation about Tolstoy or Lahiri or Rumi. He can keep cracking his head against _grief can be the garden of compassion_ as he watches Damian try, desperately, to keep things together, to assert his control, to siphon his loyalty.

Dick gives him a _look_ ; Dick is so easygoing and so bright, even now, so fast with a joke, that Jason forgets - forgot - that he’s so _smart_ , that he can see right through so much bullshit. You don’t live with Bruce as long as Dick has without having that particular talent. Robin, his first hero, Nightwing, his second. “He replaced me too, you know. With _you_.”

It’s true, and it hurts, and it hurts, and it _hurts_. “I’m not talking about this,” Dick says, “about whatever. He would come for you if he had a single whiff that you were here. And he would have come for that box, which, thanks a bunch, imagine if I had to fly _that_ through customs.”

Jason tips his head, and Dick moves so he’s straddling the bench, moving in closer. He’s the closest any person who wasn’t Damian, a child, or about to die has been to Jason in three years. He considers standing up, moving away. But then he turns so they’re face to face. “Dick,” he says, carefully. 

“What am I doing here?” Dick asks, seriously.

Jason’s mouth firms a little. “Were you in Gotham when the Basco family ran the East End?”

Dick, to his credit, doesn’t look confused. Instead he shakes his head. “No,” he tells him.

Jason takes a breath. “I was. I was little, but I remember it some of it. I asked B about it, too, but-” he starts, and shakes his head. “The Basco family wasn’t really called Basco. That wasn’t their name, but we used to call them that. The Bastian Company, that’s what they ran. They said they made shoes, or some shit like that. I don’t know the family’s real name, or anyone in it really, but I know, I remember Eddie Basco used to come by my family’s building. He was a shit.” He takes a breath. “But the Maroni family didn’t like them. Didn’t want them there. And neither did the Falcones,” he says.

Dick is serious, following along. “Yeah. Okay.”

Jason tucks his legs up, crossing them in front of him. “The Maroni family did something. They killed them, or destroyed them. I don’t know the details, because I was too young. But I remember the power vacuum didn’t last long. All the shitty, low-level assholes in the Narrows and Crime Alley, they had to choose who they would go for, right? Maroni or Falcone.” He snorts. “Back then, you ran with one or the other. Someone had to control that part of Gotham, there was too much there. Drugs, prostitutes. Power.”

Dick is looking over at the door now. Jason looks over at the door, but he doesn’t hear anything. Dick shakes his head. “Go on.”

“It wasn’t small potatoes, but the two other families were big enough that when the Basco family was gone, it was quick. That was the key. The size. If they got too big, if Basco got too powerful, they could consolidate. They could find something for themselves and come back. But if they were too small, they might scatter into smaller gangs, because they would be invisible.” Jason ducks his head a little. “Do you get it?”

Dick looks around a long moment. “It was you,” he says, suddenly. “That’s why none of this made sense. Why Damian and I couldn’t figure out-”

“You shouldn’t say his name,” Jason says, because it hurts, this hurts him, he knows, _he knows_. 

Dick holds up a hand, and Jason lets Dick continue. “We couldn’t figure out why Talia would have asked me to come. Or Bruce. We couldn’t, because it was never her, was it? It was you. You wanted me to come here. To stop...a power grab. Or to start one. I’m not here for you. I’m a catalyst for something else.” Dick looks surprised. “Because you knew I wouldn’t leave without him.”

The problem is that Jason doesn’t have to explain it, now. He’s held so many secrets so tightly, and he’s watched it unravel. Talia sent him three years ago to be her son’s bodyguard, but that was never necessary - Damian didn’t need a bodyguard, he was deadly. She wanted a spy, someone who could watch her son accumulate power. She never told Jason that, but why would she have to? 

She wanted to wait until he had siphoned enough away from Ra’s that it would make a difference. And Ra’s was doing the same; training him to pull attention, to demand loyalty, to reinforce that Ra’s was better.

Jason watched all of it, and before, Damian was just small potatoes.

And then Damian was his. And then Damian was eighteen, a man, and then Damian looked at him like he mattered. Damian was accruing followers, generals who could be swayed one way or another if he was gone, desperate for protection. Damian was a good leader, once he mastered his rage, once Jason forced him to hone it. He hadn’t known, then. God. God help him. “It was me.”

“Traitor!” they hear, and both of them move, and there is Damian, standing in the doorway. His maid, tiny, is staring, standing right behind him. She doesn’t understand what is being said: she doesn’t understand English. Jason knows what happened. She saw Dick, and she followed the rules. She went to get her prince.

“My lord,” Jason says, standing up, switching languages. His heart feels like it’s standing still; it makes time unravel. He wants to say more, and he thinks he’s moving, but he’s not fast enough. Damian is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you: Mici you can't just have characters disappear at the end of scenes because you don't know-
> 
> me: SCREECHES AS SHE RUNS TO POST THIS


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a note for those of you following along in real time: I added one more chapter, because I'm a fool.

They are moving fast.

Luckily, Dick never unpacked, but more luckily, there was nothing in Dick’s room that he really needed to take with him. The Joker’s head, okay, maybe that’s important, he thinks. It’s important to Jason, but clearly not as important as Damian, who Jason is trying to find. 

When he disappears, Jason shoots after him, but this place is a maze at best, and there are too many secret passages. “Go back to your room, pack your things,” he says, and he grabs the little girl by the arm. He says something to her, fast, in that language that Dick doesn’t understand even the slightest bit of, and she looks at Dick with big, round eyes. “She’ll take you. When you’re done, she’ll take you to a meeting spot, okay? I’ll bring him.” He turns, he grabs his mask and puts it on over his face.

Dick thinks this sounds fake. But Dick also doesn’t have much of a choice, because a moment later, he’s getting tugged in the other direction and Jason is disappearing. The little girl - a maid, he knows she’s a maid, he wishes he knew her name so he could think of her by it - is holding his hand, determined as she guides him into the tunnels that the servants use.

This was how he found the kitchens in the first place, how he found Jason. He knew it was risky but he had to talk to him.

“Name?” he asks her, in English, and then he starts rotating his way through languages. When he hits on Pashto - a language he speaks almost nothing of, except to be able to ask for someone’s name, how to get to the airport, some inappropriate things he’s not repeating to this child, and _is this water safe to drink_ , she turns to look at him.

She looks shyly up at him. “Abhaya,” she says, softly. She says something in stilted, halting Pashto - clearly it’s not her first language, either, and he shakes his head. She points to herself. “Abhaya,” she says again. That’s her name. And then she points to him, and in a firm, knowing voice. “Nightwing.”

Oh, blessed heaven and earth. Oh, _Jason_. “Okay,” he says, and he smiles. “Yes. Nightwing.”

She nods, like this is a very good understanding, and she keeps guiding him until they get back to his room, and she opens the trap door. She crawls out, first, and a moment later Dick is crawling out, only to hear Damian’s voice. “Come out, and close the door behind you.”

Dick steps out, slowly, because there is a level of panic in Damian’s voice, and Abhaya is already in the room. She’s curled up in a ball on her knees, her hands over her head, her face against the ground. She’s so tiny, and Damian is looking at her like he’s considering how to best smash a cockroach.

Dick absolutely won’t let that happen, but Damian has a sword in hand. Dick is glad to see there isn’t any blood on it. “Okay. Look. Let her go,” he says, even though he won’t find Jason again if he does. He hopes - prays - that if there is something that can come out of it, is that this kid won’t get hurt.

“Her?” Damian asks, and he kicks her away. The blow lands hard enough to make her whimper, and Dick rushes forward a little, but Damian raises his sword and holds it out steady. “She is less than nothing, lucky to be obedient enough that she knew to get me to hear-” he starts, but his voice cracks. “I should have had him kill you when you landed!” he screams.

Dick recognizes that fury, because he’s seen it before. A broken heart, he thinks. 

What is going on here?

Dick holds his hands out. “Listen. I’m not here-”

Whatever he was going to say - and Dick doesn’t really know what he was going to say, because what do you say to an eighteen year old tyrant with a sword? Even Bruce didn’t prepare him for this - is interrupted by Damian moving, and Dick’s training and instinct kicks in. 

This. This is his element. He flips back, and the fight is _fast._ Damian fights with the elegance of a man who was trained from birth for this, quicker than almost anyone Dick’s met, but Dick is known for his speed. It’s not even, not by a longshot, but there’s an advantage that Damian has: he doesn’t care if he kills Dick, but Dick certainly isn’t going to kill him. 

He backflips up onto the ceiling, clinging there by notched, artistic grooves. “Come down and fight me, you coward!” Damian yells.

“Seems like a bad idea,” Dick shouts back, although then Damian is throwing _knives_ at him, so he has to move back into the fight. It feels like forever; Damian is stronger than he looks, and he hits _hard_ , so every connect feels like being smashed by Bruce himself. 

It isn’t going well - except for the fact that Damian really seems to _hate_ the running monologue that Dick has gone with. It’s not his usual _offend the villains masterful ways._ Instead:

“You’re thinking too much,” he says, casually, like this is a routine thing, as he jumps again, flipping, almost catching Damian’s chin with his foot. “There,” he says, dodging. “Thinking,” he says. He dodges again with a tumble this time. “Really, if you want to hit me, you’ll have to stop aiming for where I am-”

“Shut up!” 

“And aim for-”

“ _Stop talking_!” Damian shouts, and finally manages to cross the space between them, to try and catch Dick by the foot.

Something happens, then. It’s not usual for Dick to lose track of a fight - the last time it happened, he thinks that it was because he had a concussion - but the door opens, and Dick sees the flash of _red_ -

- _Jason_ -

-and he sees Damian’s sword moving towards Jason. Damian is saying something.

Sometimes, there are things that happen in slow motion. The most obvious memory that he can think of is when his parents died. When Bruce hit him, after Jason’s death. A bad catch with a grapple, for Barbara, when she was still-

-Jericho-

But none of them have happened like this. All of those things were Dick _reacting_ , stuck still, unable to do anything. This time, it’s different. The idea of someone - anyone - hurting Jason again is embedded into every cell of his body. His body is still moving, a blade that Damian had thrown picked up off the ground and the weight of it suddenly in Damian’s side.

Damian drops his sword in sheer surprise, turning to look at Jason. He makes this noise, and he says something. It doesn’t matter if Dick can understand the language he says it in or not; he can’t hear anything right now, the blood pushing out all sound as it hammers in his ears.

Jason, whose face Dick can’t see. Jason, who has a blade in his own hand from somewhere, and who is stabbing Dick in the gut.

_Shit_.

The tension in the room snaps, because Damian curled up, coiled on the ground around the blade, and Jason is staring, his eyes huge and horrified, at Dick. “No no no,” he says, and he turns. Panic. 

Dick, better than anyone, understands panic. The way adrenaline feels when it’s out of control, when there’s no net and no safety and no solution. “Jay,” he gasps. Oh, help. Stomach wounds hurt like a bitch. “It’s okay.”

It is absolutely not okay.

Jason looks around. Abhaya, smart girl that she is, took off, and Dick is really grateful for it. She’s too little to see this; a family spat in the way only this family can do it. “Jay,” he tries again. “I’m not mad,” he stammers, because it’s easier than the other things he wants. _Don’t let me die here_ , he thinks, but can’t say. If he says that, and he does, Jason will never let it go. He knows him, his little brother. 

Damian is gasping and grasping for air, and Dick knows he must have got him in the lung. With medical attention, it isn’t likely to kill him. Still. 

He starts to lose time.

Or that’s what he thinks. He hears Jason’s voice. “It’s okay,” he says, but Jason sounds far away. “I promise, it’s okay, please forgive me,” Dick hears, but he doesn’t know who Jason is talking to. Him. Or Damian. Or maybe both.

Dick knows he’s passing out, but a moment later he’s being hefted up. “Come on,” Jason tries, “come on,” he says, and the state of his balance means that he’s heaving Damian up too.

“Hey,” Dick murmurs, pleased. “It’s so good you got so _buff_ , Li’l Wing,” he cracks.

“Oh, fuck off,” is what Dick thinks Jay replies with. Probably.

He loses time.

There’s snow.

He loses time.

There’s the noise of an engine. 

He loses time; there’s snow. “Dick,” he hears. “Dick, they’re coming,” he hears.

“Mmmhmm,” Dick manages in reply. “Tell them to bring sundaes for all this _ice cream_ ,” he says, cold to the bone. Getting colder. The pain in his stomach is screaming, but Dick is good at disassociating his pain away. 

There’s muttering. “Shit, shit, _shit_.” It feels like it’s an eternity away. Is he losing blood still? More blood? Oh. Is he going to die? In a field of ice cream.

He’s getting dragged through the snow; he sees someone else getting dragged too. Oh. It’s Bruce.

Oh.

It’s not Bruce.

“Jaybird,” he gasps. He knows where they are now, lucidity returning. “Plane is _locked_. Won’t open for you. Jaybird,” he tries, but then he sees Jason, still wearing the muzzle. “ _Jaybird_ ,” he says, and laughs. Ow. “ _All the little birds on jaybird street love to hear-_ ”

“Don’t you fucking finish that sentence, you unbearable nightmare, you can’t even shut up when you’re _dying_ ,” Jason snarls, and Dick laughs. Oh. Fuck, that _hurts_. They’re at the plane, and Jason can’t open it, it’s tied to biometrics, and then-

-like a miracle, Jason touches the panel with his hand, lines his eyes up, and like a miracle, the door opens. “Oh,” Dick says. “Bruce is not gonna like this,” he tries. “I’m gonna die over here now,” he says cheerily as he faceplants into a cot. Well. Not literally, because he still has a _blade_ stuck in his _stomach_. Metaphorically. A metaphorical faceplant onto his back.

He hears the engine start. “Jay,” he says, urgently. “Jaaaaay.”

Jason responds with the irritation of someone who has better things to do. Get the out of country before anyone finds out. Save Dick’s life. Save Damian’s life. “What.”

“What did that little- _Abhaya_ , what did she call you? It wasn’t your name.” Dick asks. “Answer me because I’m in pain. I need to think about something else.”

Jason’s voice is slow in coming. “Monster,” he finally replies. “That’s the best translation.” 

Oh. “You’re not,” Dick says. “A monster.”

He loses time.

He hears Tim’s voice. “Who is this?” Tim is asking, and then he hears, “-ow, what are you doing, B!” 

Bruce’s voice is deep and soothing, even though he’s practically roaring Batman through the speaker. “We have the power to drop this plane, _who is this?_ ”

There’s silence for a long time. Dick chirps, “We’re already dying, no need to kill us faster!” He laughs. Fuck that hurts. Why does he keep thinking that’s a good idea? There is a dagger still in his stomach.

Jason finally speaks, the last thing that Dick hears before he passes out, well and truly. “Don’t land us,” he says, “Dick will explain. I promise, Bruce-”

~~~~

In the dark of Damian’s bedroom, there wasn’t anything between them.

As usual, Damian went in first, and Jason closed the door behind them, locking it. They had so little time that was quiet, that could be considered theirs. Damian worked eighteen hours of the day, so that moment between the few hours of sleep that he got and the end of his work felt softer.

Of course, sometimes the work was Jason’s; they both felt the rising tension of Damian’s position, and they both suffered for it, but it was Jason who felt it less. When Damian worried about everything, Jason didn’t care about it; he only had one worry.

He settled on the bed, reaching up, to remove his mask and touch his face. Damian barely looked over as he shed his own layers, deep inside of his own head. “Is your grandfather serious about not sending you into the field at all this year?” he asked, because it was a topic of conversation at dinner. Well. Not Jason’s dinner. Jason’s dinner was earlier.

“Mm?” Damian asked, and Jason knew that he was well and truly distracted by something else. He came over, that rare, precious softness on his face. No one else knew about this. About how Damian had this side of him, this side that only Jason saw. He ran a hand through Jason’s hair. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, smirking that delicious slow smile, his teeth sharp like a predator. He settled one knee on the mattress and the other between Jason’s legs, and leaned down to press his face just against Jason’s cheekbone.

That was at best unusual. There was nothing _at worst_ about it, because Damian was an exceptionally attentive lover, once they got over the hump of _premature ejaculations_ and _okay you’re not very good at this_. That was an awkward few weeks, but Damian was determined, and it helped that they were both young men still in possession of _extremely_ active libidos.

It helped, too, that it’s not like Jason’s experience was vast or anything. A few lovers in the League, though, so at least he knew _some_ , but he wasn’t exactly Casanova. For fuck’s sake: he had died a virgin.

Once they got over it, and Damian discovered the vast world of _how to torment your lover in search of complete and total control over their body_ , and Jason discovered that he kind of (really) liked that, they were solid. 

“Doesn’t matter?” Jason asked, tipping his head a little. There were days he could kiss him first, there were days where he could take him apart, where he was, well. Not in charge. Never that. But certainly more aggressive. It was always good to check what day they were at. 

Damian turned his head, and his hand reached into Jason’s curls, his hand becoming a firm fist. Ah. That’s the kind of day. “I know you’re not deaf, beast of mine,” he whispered, but that smile came back. “Goa agreed to my terms.”

Jason heard the words, he really did. But they didn’t matter in the face of Damian’s other hand, easing his shirt open, tweaking a nipple, easing down his stomach. “Sure,” he said, because despite Damian’s eagerness and youth, it was Jason who always came undone first. He was the more skilled fighter, but no one had Damian’s obsessive control over his own body. Damian eased his shirt off, and then leaned down to press something that was too close to an affectionate kiss to one of Jason’s scars. His scars were not terribly old - all given to him by League assassins, but Damian treated them all either with a sense of disdain that someone could mark Jason who wasn’t him, or with a sense of reverence.

Reverence, today. He gasped as Damian pressed down on him, pushed him back into the bed, and ran the tip of his wicked tongue over the raised skin of where he had been sliced at, stabbed at. Jason closed his eyes, because he felt like he was getting too much sensory input, and he needed to rid himself of something, anything. 

“Open eyes,” Damian commanded. “I want you to watch,” he said, the pleased tone of his voice seeping through the smugness. There was a difference; it was subtle, but Damian pleased was more rapturous. No one else heard that.

It belonged to Jason.

Damian’s mouth kept moving over scars, his hand pushing his trousers down aside, and Damian managed to catch his foot in the band and tug them down Jason’s long legs. The way he moved was always impressive; Damian was tall, of course, but he moved like he could take up as much space as he wanted. The world would bend to his will.

Jason was already hard, already making a wet mess, but that? Damian’s hands had clamped, steellike, around his hips and pushed him down, and he was swallowing him without any hesitation. Jason would gladly die again for this, for more of this; Damian’s eyes were the same bright green as the pit, and he could command him back to life.

But Damian was not kind, either, and he wouldn’t, didn’t, let Jason finish in his mouth. He pulled up, instead, licking a stripe up Jason’s abs and to his throat. “Wait here,” he said, and Jason gasped a little. “Not an inch,” came the next command, serious as if he was just told to kill someone.

_Goa_ was the word that sat in Jason’s brain. What was Goa?

Damian left only for a moment, to strip fully as Jason watched, every inch of his body a revelation of bronze and steel, and then to go to his chest and dig through it a moment. He brought back a collar. It wasn’t a dainty collar; it was a posture collar, designed to brace at the shoulder and go all the way up to Jason’s jaw. It was also one of those favorite pieces that Damian didn’t use as much, as if not putting it on would make every time he used it special.

Still.

It connected to a wicked leash, one with two clips, one on each side of the collar. Two points, Damian contended, gives him better control. _I’m not a dog,_ Jason said. Damian smiled that wicked smile. _You’re my beast_.

Still.

Jason’s whole body was still as Damian put it on, Jason’s whole body was still right up until Damian told him to move again, and then he was getting up on his knees to match Damian, although Damian tugged the leash a little so that Jason’s head was just a bit below his. Damian’s hand was at his cock, stroking again, and he was smiling a smile that made him look so charming that it was impossible to comprehend that this was the same man who would gladly tie him there and leave him to not jerk off, and trust he would be obeyed. “Do you want to go to Goa?”

Goa, there it was again. “My-” he starts, but his cock twitches in Damian’s hand and he has to rethink the entire world, because right now the world was right there, in the way Damian was looking at him, in the way his other hand kept his head right where Damian wanted it. “Would I get to-” he started. Stopped. “ _Ah_ ,” he managed, only years of control keeping his hips from moving. Damian stroked him again. “-go to the beach?”

“I will empty it of people so no one can look at you,” Damian promised; the possessiveness in his voice made Jason shiver a bit, and his hips moved, even though his head couldn’t. He had to keep looking at Damian, his head trapped. Damian pushed him back, and Jason folded, arched back as Damian put the leash over and clipped it to the headboard.

Jason couldn’t see anything. He could move; Damian hadn’t bound his arms or his legs. But he didn’t. He stayed that way, a creation of negative space, his dick hard against the curve of his hip. Damian’s hand worked down his side, then, pressed him open, and then Jason’s world dissolved into nothing. Slick fingers, tight muscles, hot hands, open, open, open. Damian’s deep voice as he reassured him. “All of this, all of this is mine,” he said, opening Jason up, pressing his thick cock into him. 

Jason couldn’t do anything but gasp, and moan, and press his hips down, down, trying to get more. Damian liked it when he did that; he liked Jason’s control to a point, and that point was passed the second that his dick was inside of Jason’s body. He struggled, his whole body pushing as he gasped, overwhelmed by the stretch and his muscles and just how _good_ it felt. Every time that he thought he got a grip on himself, Damian bit him, or thrust hard, or pinched the tip of his cock-

- _oh hell_ -

-he cried out as he felt Damian’s whole body tighten above him, as he felt Damian come inside of him. Damian reached down, to unclip the collar, to tug him up. Jason’s body is still tight, even as Damian kissed him, bit him on the mouth, and jerked him off until-

-until, which is only moments later, until he came over Damian’s fingers with a wail. He curved his whole body, then, inward, to catch Damian and pull him close. They were there, quiet for a moment. Damian’s hands undid the collar, and Jason rolled his neck by instinct, and pulled Damian closer by desire. “Let me go,” Damian finally said, after a moment, and Jason didn’t obey right away. He didn’t want to.

“Jason,” Damian said, his name a rare thing, only spoken between them. He used to call him _Todd_. He didn’t anymore. Now he rarely used his name, and never in public, never where anyone might here. Jason would lose himself in the things they called him there. _The Heir’s Beast_. _Monster_. 

Damian was the only one. His name. _Jason._

He closed his eyes and let him go, and lay there. Goa. He heard water, which meant that Damian was bathing. He would get up in a minute. Goa. Why did that feel so ominous?

He got up and followed Damian to bathe, and it was later, when they were lying there, Damian’s head against his own, his arm over Jason’s chest, that he realized. Goa was on a map, he remembered. Talia had it on her map of _secure_ locations. Goa was a good point, and the League there was led by a woman who ruled through her husband. Talia ran Goa.

He looked at Damian, asleep, and he felt the panic start to bubble through his body. He had spent years watching Ra’s eyes on Damian, spent years thinking of how Talia’s son was casually becoming more powerful, and worried about that side, but this was the first time-

-Talia would destroy him. Not for taking Goa, she was not so petty. It would not be revenge; it would be strategic. Remove her son; now that he had Goa, it would show the cracks that Talia could exploit, or destroy, or both. She could probably tug some of the other places, the places that were so small that no one thought twice about the chess pieces that Damian was accruing. 

Or Ra’s would do it, to remind his daughter that he was the Head. He could find another heir. Damian had been convenient, but what did it matter when you were immortal? He could afford to wait.

He felt it in his bones. He remembered the Narrows. He remembered Gotham. 

There was a solution to this, but Jason couldn’t see it. Gotham. He knew that was it; he had always known he would go back. He couldn’t see it. 

Gotham.

Shit.

~~~~~

He wakes in a medical bay of some kind; his wrists are strapped down, which is offensive enough, but also his legs, and it’s unbearable. He struggles against the tube in his throat, and against the bindings, and against-

-the last thing he remembers is Jason, holding him, the last thing he remembers is blood on snow. But he knows that he’s no longer in Nanda Parbat; it’s an instinct, almost, a bone-deep awareness. As if the altitude feels different, the weight of the very air. Too hot. Too heavy. 

He thrashes again and he hears someone yell, “Alfred! He woke up!” and he hears someone running, and then he sees someone older, an older man he recognizes from photographs that were given to him when he was still so small. The shock of it makes him stop fighting. 

“It’s all right,” Alfred says. “I am taking the tube out,” he tells him, as if he’s stupid. No, he knows. It’s not that. It is because most people panic. Damian is not most people, but as the tube comes out and he breathes on his own he feels the terror anyway. “You should not try to speak yet. Wait.”

Damian turns his head, and he can see Richard Grayson lying on a bed. He is, infuriatingly, not tied down, and also not intubated, but he is attached to monitors. “Master Timothy went to fetch Master Bruce.”

Damian whips his head back to look at Alfred. “No,” he says firmly. “He absolutely cannot see me like this,” he continues, his voice croaking and dim. His father, to meet him for the first time, while he’s waylaid like a weakling, taken down by a stab wound to the chest? No. _No._ “No,” he says. “If he comes in here-” he starts, but the heart monitor starts to slam into awareness like a traitor, revealing the sins of Damian’s fear. 

Before the only creature to ever know that secret was Jason. Jason, who would grip Damian’s wrist like he was holding a piece of porcelain, and lay his head on Damian’s chest, and know to match the speed of his heart. He would lay their wrists over each other. Jason was never afraid of anything. _It’ll match eventually_ , he would say, before an important meeting. Like it was not some small miracle.

Oh, he’ll kill him. He will run his sword through the traitor’s heart and that will cure him of this disease that infected him. Jason Todd, a virus rampant in his blood.

Alfred seems to realize that the heart monitor is telling him something he should not know, because he nods. “Very well, sir,” he says. “I will tell Master Bruce you should not receive visitors.”

He is still lashed down to the bed, but he calms, then. He is an assassin, a prince among assassins. They cannot keep him forever.

He does not know how much time passed, between home and here. Between rising and falling. He thinks it must have been some time, but he likely had some surgery done. His grandfather must be frantic. He wonders if his mother knows.

He does not know how much time passes before another man, this one sleek, and moving like he was part of the shadows, comes to sit near him, next to his bed. A lot of time. He remembers care, he remembers Alfred’s care, and Dick’s eventual moving out of the bay. 

The other man opens a computer, and he’s typing - loudly, this is a _sick bay_ , does no one have a single ounce of respect - and doing something on it that Damian cannot see. “Are you _Timothy_?” Damian asks, his voice still a harsh croak.

Timothy looks up from where he’s sitting. “Yes,” he replies. “Tim is fine,” he assures Damian, as if Damian will actually call anyone by one of their ridiculous nicknames. “Jason didn’t tell us your name, though,” he says.

The sound of Jason’s name in someone else’s mouth makes the bile rise, an instinct that he thought would have died with the revelation that he had been betrayed. Damian worked hard - tremendously hard - to ensure that no one ever called him that. There was so much power in names. There were so few people who were so powerful that their names were reserved for only the people who they loved. His grandfather. Himself. He wanted Jason to be someone like that. 

Timothy said Jason’s name without any of the reverence it deserved, was the first thought. Tossed out like a fact. _Jason_. At least when the servants called him _the Beast_ , they did it as an act of devotion. He clicks his tongue, and turns his head away. He isn’t going to tell this boy his name before he will tell his own father. 

Timothy doesn’t seem to think that’s was a dismissal. “He told us some,” he tells him. “Um,” he starts. His voice is gentle, like he’s speaking to an invalid. “He said your family was going to try and kill you.”

Damian hears the words, but they feel foreign. He knows so many languages, surely the signals got mixed up. Surely Todd was lying. Surely this is all a ruse.

But it fits. It locks together so well, so perfectly, that it must be it. Like a key in a lock of an assassin’s box, designed for one person. He can hear someone screaming, inside of his own head. “What else,” he starts, ice in his voice cold enough to sear, “did he tell you?”

Nothing, he hopes. He wants the answer to be _nothing_. No secrets, no riddles, no truths. No map layouts of the place the Damian still considers home. No words of what he thought they meant to each other. Of what he still means.

He did not _understand_. Not until he heard those words - _it was me_. He would have never killed Jason, not then. He wanted to kill Grayson, for the threat he was and still is, but not _Jason_. Surely, he could have cured him of whatever homesickness infected him. He was ready to kill Grayson. He was ready to make Jason do it. _Give me his head_ , he had said, in that room.

And Jason stabbed him in the stomach, instead.

He did not understand until he saw that and instead of thinking that Jason was weak, he _forgave_ him. Instantly. Without hesitating. He thinks he remembers seeing Jason looking down at him, and thinking that his face was so beautiful, and he thinks he remembers hearing him beg for forgiveness.

And he understood it, then. Why his mother still calls his father _Beloved_ , even though his father cares for her not at all. He understood the terror of that feeling, the depth of it. A heart, unkindled and cold, suddenly gently given flame by another, and he had not _noticed_.

This is too much.

This is too much even for him, and he knows it.

He wants Jason to have said nothing, because it means Jason loves him, too.

Timothy looks slightly surprised. “He-” he begins.

“Nevermind,” Damian interrupts, haughty, suddenly terrified. The heart rate monitor tells the truth again. “Summon Batman,” he says. “I will speak to him now.”

Timothy looks unsure, and Damian gives him a long, lingering look. “Go now,” he prompts, and finally Tim goes.

It does not take long. Ah. 

Batman stands there, staring at him, and he looks back. He is wearing a dark shirt and trousers, but he looks offensively western, wholly foreign to any of Damian’s aesthetic sensibilities. Damian clears his throat in an attempt to make his voice behave. “I thought,” he begins, “that you would be taller.”

There is a long and pregnant moment of silence as he approaches the side of the bed. Damian is somewhat upright, probably to reduce the pressure on his lungs. 

They just look at each other. “No one told me about you,” Batman finally says, breaking that silence. 

“No,” Damian acknowledges. “They did not. My grandfather made the decision. I think my mother did not agree.”

“You weren’t what Talia wanted me to bring home,” he says. “Honestly, I thought they were love letters.”

Damian does not mention that he knows there are love letters; not many. Maybe two, or three, but he also knows his mother keeps them in a box that travels with her. “My mother would give me up before she would give those up,” he admits. “But it was not my mother who sent for you.” So everyone understands his mother’s priorities here: it was, and always will be, the man in front of him. Damian is not offended. 

He understands.

“Are you intending on staying in Gotham?” Batman asks.

No. Yes. No. Maybe. Where else can he go now? His grandfather will not take him back, like he fell from the nest to be scented by another predator. They both wish to kill him anyway. “I do not have anywhere to go,” he mutters, feeling the shame build in his throat. It is not a comfortable sensation. He has been taught that shame is a lesser thing, an emotion only the weak feel.

And still he does nothing but forgive Jason for making him feel it.

There is a noise, from Batman. It is somewhere between sympathy and irritation. Damian knows because he makes that noise, too. “If you want to stay here, you will learn to live by our code. My code,” he clarifies. “You are not an assassin, here.”

Batman strips Damian of everything he is, just like that. Damian looks straight at him, his mouth pressing together so tightly he can feel the muscle in his jaw jump. “I should like to learn of you, before I choose. I can respect your ethos until then.” Batman nods, as if that’s acceptable. 

“Will you tell me your name?” He asks, then, and Damian breathes out. 

His name is not really a secret. Everyone in the League knows it. But this is his father. For some reason, all of this feels different. Heightened. He doesn’t know how to speak to him. “Damian Al Ghul,” he says, finally. “I am your son.”

Batman’s eyes light up in something that Damian does not recognize. It is not pride, but perhaps it is close. “Bruce Wayne,” he says, carefully. Damian knows.

They sit there and silence takes them both a moment before Damian speaks again. “Where is Todd?” he asks, finally. “He has not come to see me and beg forgiveness.”

Bruce looks unfathomable, then. “Jason is gone,” he says. “He left after he was certain we had you. We tried to follow him-”

_Jason is gone, Jason is gone, Jason is gone_ , is the song that Damian’s heart crafts, each beat just a little too long to be natural. It _hurts_ , like a thorn going into his palm, or the scream of a burn. Hurts unnaturally. “He is one of the finest of us,” Damian says, and while the words sound natural, they feel like they are made of something sharp, shredding the inside of his mouth. _Jason is gone_. “You will not find him.”

His face feels like it is on fire; his ribs ache in something that is not the healing stab wound. _Jason is gone_. His hands are still tied down, and he can’t even bring them to his face. His body does not obey. _Jason is gone_. The cry is deep in his stomach, coiled there.

Jason is gone, and Damian still forgives him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FOR THOSE CONCERNED Abhaya is fine she ran and hid in some little corner and she's only seven so she just kept the secret forever of what happened but no one suspected her so she lives, she's fine, don't @ me
> 
> also please don't hesitate to leave comments, because I love them, I really do


	5. Epilogue: Love Letters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A small note: in this universe, Tim is still Robin at like, what, 20, nerd, get a real codename and move out of your dad's house
> 
> (I love Tim)

“Black Bat says that you’re at the spot. Keep your comm open for once,” Oracle says, bossy as usual. 

“I would keep my comm open if it made the slightest difference,” Corax replies, but he does it anyway. Batman’s already reamed him out once this week for going offline, and he doesn’t relish dealing with it again. “Don’t chatter in my ear.”

“You know you have to learn to deal with chatter,” Nightwing says with a gentle laugh. 

“This is not even your city,” Corax snaps. “Go and do your job,” he tells him, and the laugh that follows makes him know he is being absolutely ignored. 

Six months ago, he was prince; six months ago, no one ignored him. 

This morning, he stared at the television while Drake and Cain watched some entertainer talk about something frivolous. Six months ago, frivolity was spending a training morning playing elaborate games of throwing knives. Now it’s six women on a couch talking about utter nonsense. 

He didn’t want to stay, not really. There was nothing for him, here; he is not a very good detective, not like Drake or his father, and he is too brutal, really, for their code. Even though he is precise, and he follows it to the letter, he finds it all infuriating. There were only two things keeping him in Gotham; the ability to get to know the man who is his blood, whose legacy is now Damian’s legacy too, and that Nightwing taught him to _fly_.

Nightwing is absurd. The man never shuts up, the man never stops moving. He is electricity in motion, and Damian absolutely despises him at least eighty percent of the time. Nightwing walked into his life and tossed it upside down, but Damian doesn’t really blame him for that. A month after their recoveries, he showed up at the Manor, where Damian was still in a sulk over everything. It seemed everyone was ignoring him because he was being “unreasonable” and “bratty” and “making people cry,” or some nonsense like that. No one in the place liked the truth, Bruce did not like him, and the only person who could spend time with him without pitching things at his head was Alfred.

(He quite likes Alfred. Commendable loyalty to a family of idiots.)

Dick took him out, which was against his Father’s orders, and taught him how the Bats fly. Taught him how he flies, better than his father, better than anyone. Damian knew some, of course, from his own training, but it was nothing like this. This wasn’t just for practical matters; Dick flew for pleasure, because he loved it, because in the air there was nothing but _air_. The world and the weight of it was down there. Duty and honor and assassins, legacy and destiny, all of that was far away. There was only freedom.

It was another three months; of flying lessons, of aborted training, of one time showing Stephanie Brown exactly how to wire a bomb to only take out a single apartment without structural damage (it seemed she had some issue with a former lover, no one was hurt, but Father was not pleased) before Damian agreed, more importantly, his Father agreed, too, that Damian had too little to do. He did not really want it, but there were only so many things he could do. He scared the family, he scared the upper crust of Gotham, he scared girls, and boys. He was too smart for college and easily riled. Too bored. 

He chafed in the solitude and in the company, too. Sometimes Grayson could placate him, but he was not a child and Grayson had a job, and a city. Drake had a job, and a role. Cain had lessons to learn to speak, and lessons to dance, and she genuinely enjoyed her life. Damian barely had an interest in anything except in the way Gotham _was_. A blowsy, slovenly old creature. Gotham wanted so badly to be a city worth saving.

All of this culminated in a tense argument where no one got anything they wanted, including Damian, and it was decided that he would try Corax out for size. It seemed _Raven_ was already taken as a codename, and Damian would rather maim himself than go by _Bat Boy_.

Father arranged for the armor; sleek and lightweight, black with the barest green trim. He refused a cape, to give him better ability to fly, for riskier stunts, where his father and Robin were weighted down by their flapping capes. 

This is his fifth time alone, without any of the other members of his _family_ trailing after him, still unsure if he would just murder some criminal. The truth is that Damian can’t seem to explain to them that _murder_ and _assassination_ are not the same. Or if they understand, they seem to categorize it all under _killing_.

Whatever.

Robin had been tracking this crime lord for a few weeks now, the rumors on the street whispering. Black Bat had tracked it to this warehouse, and Batman had agreed that it was fine to send Corax. Corax, who thinks that there are too many warehouses in Gotham. Why are there so many warehouses? How much _stuff_ can they possibly need to store in this city?

He lands, silent, on a catwalk above the main part of the warehouse, peering down to what was once the main production floor. There’s Sionis; he recognizes him from the detailed files that Robin keeps. There are his lieutenants - there are a few other prominent drug dealers. This does not look like a shipment. They’re sitting at a table, and they look distinctly uncomfortable. “Does anyone know what this is about?”

“I don’t think any of us would be still here, waiting, if we knew,” someone replies to him. Corax smirks to himself; this is an old tactic. Make your enemies wait a little. Make them sit and stew. 

“I heard that this guy took the Narrows territory by killing anyone running drugs and replaced it with his own men,” someone says.

Someone else disagrees. “No, he just killed the lieutenants,” they say, “and conscripted the kids. Now anyone who wants to distribute anything has to deal with him directly.”

This sounds right, to what Robin told Corax. Corax sees the mess that Gotham is so clearly, in a way that Father doesn’t. A million small gangs, smashing against the Bat, no wonder crime was out of control.

Damian, the prince, would not have ever let this proliferate this way. Corax, the superhero, has very little choice in the matter. Batman made that clear. His way, or no way at all.

There’s a squawk, and it’s Oswald Cobblepot. Corax hears Oracle in his ear. “He supposedly went clean last year,” she tells him, “keep an eye on him.”

Every time Oracle speaks, Corax tenses. At home, he would have heard something so obvious, but they tell him, told him, that the earpiece is designed for that. He doesn’t know if he believes it. He doesn’t reply. He stays still where he is.

The next voice that breaks speaks makes him tense more. “You can believe what you like,” he says, and Corax feels his whole body flood with cold. He knows that voice. His heart is screaming that same beat it did months ago, a lifetime ago. _Jason is gone, Jason is gone, Jason is gone_. He practically feels the next words glue him to the floor. How dare he do this? How dare he have this power? “But it doesn’t change the fact that your operations are my operations.”

Whatever happens next hardly matters. Corax turns his comms off, switches the camera in his mask off, and he doesn’t listen to the argument, the fight, the manipulations, whatever. He doesn’t care about them. He moves in a little closer to the light, to get a better view. Jason is there on the other side of the warehouse, on the opposite catwalk, wearing a _suit_ , the coat draped over his shoulders, his hand in his pockets. His head is tossed up in a pose that speaks to arrogance, to power, and he’s wearing his red mask. It doesn’t distort his voice. Damian had not wanted it to distort his voice. He wanted to be able to hear him, when he gave him that mask, more than a year ago.

He looks like a young tyrant, elegant, sleek, terrible.

What happens next hardly matters, but Damian is still listening. “Your dead men’s switches, your power, your contacts, all of those are mine,” Jason says, and Damian - it’s Damian, now, as if he cannot possibly be what his father wanted him to be, named by his mother and crafted by his grandfather - is so proud he could burst. 

There was power shifting, Robin said. He had told Damian as much. They found 17 heads in a duffel bag, all belonging to low-level lieutenants of bigger crime lords. They didn’t understand it; although Damian commended the clean lines of the severed necks. No one at the manor appreciated talent. Robin thought it must be one gang cannibalizing the others, but it seemed sloppy, to take that kind of talent. Unless they weren’t willing to turn, or there was something else.

In fairness, though Damian, at the time, had not understood why, either. But he does now. This is not cannibalization. This is a coup. It’s elegant, and it’s neat, and it’s almost bloodless. 20 men had gone missing, 17 heads had been found in a duffel bag, but in Damian’s opinion, that was as bloodless as could be managed. Jason had to do it, to make sure they understood. He was new, but he was serious.

He watches the petty squabbles, the predictable back and forth, the display of power: not a bag of heads, but worse; folders in the middle of the table. The secrets that Jason has harvested and is willing to show off. Promises of more secrets. Secrets he learned from those that the people that these bosses considered _loyal._

Damian knows the power of loyalty. He learned it early, and he taught it to Jason.

“Now,” Jason says, when all of this is done. When he has shown them the barest display of power. “You’re all going to walk out that door. You’re going to look at each other, and realize that I don’t care about your petty territorial squabbles, and you’re going to realize you all work for me. If you have a problem with it? Keep it to yourselves.”

And one by one, they leave. They do not kiss the ring. Damian knows what that means; they will need more convincing. He wonders if Jason realizes it.

Finally, Jason is alone, and Damian moves out of the shadow. “They will pull on the leash,” he says, speaking a language he has not spoken in six months, sitting on the parapet of the catwalk, his legs crossed at the ankle.

Jason looks over, suddenly, and there’s fury for a moment, and then there’s something else. So Damian pulls all the dignity he thought he could just forget, and gives him a look. “You betrayed me.” The fury in Jason’s face - in his eyes - it’s gone in an instant.

“You lived,” Jason says, not moving, as if he moves Damian might disappear. “That’s what mattered to me.”

Damian nods his head, exactly once. That is as much of a thank you as he will deign to give. They are not all right. “You left me,” he accuses.

There is silence. “I couldn’t stay,” Jason tells him, as if he didn’t know that. Damian has spent half a year with these insufferable people, and he knows that while Jason would have managed some of what Damian has tolerated, they would not have understood them. Jason has history there that Damian still does not fully grasp. 

But that still doesn’t change that he left. This is what Damian knows now. Jason left, but didn’t tell them anything. Jason left him. Damian forgives him. “What are you doing, then?” he asks, “Trying to upset my Father?”

Jason still doesn’t move. “No,” he finally says. “I don’t care about that,” he explains, “I only care about one thing. I needed-” he starts, and stops. “Can I come closer?”

“No.” The reply is an order, and Jason dips his head. “Tell me what you needed.”

There is a thick silence. There is all of twenty feet between them, open air, and it might as well be a universe. Damian hates it. But still. Jason is quiet for too long. “Tell me,” Damian says again, pressing as much command into the words as he can manage.

“I needed to build the empire, first.”

Damian feels a shiver of pleasure up his spine. “Why is that?” he asks, smirking.

The silence lingers again, but before Damian can command, Jason replies. “For you,” he says, closing his eyes. “It is a gift for you.” 

Damian’s smile is slow. “Beast of mine,” he purrs. This is a love letter. This is better than a love letter. Jason took him from his empire to save him. And knowing what would happen to Damian - the boredom, the frustration, the desire to pull on the leash his father put on him - he decided to give him one back. “Come here.”

Jason does not fly like Dick, graceful and quick, but the result is the same, and by the time that Damian has turned around to face the catwalk, he’s there, standing just between his legs. He is looking at him, and Damian’s hands come to his muzzle. He traces his thumbs at Jason’s cheeks, and Jason is looking at him with that bottomless expression. “You will be paying for this for a long time.”

Jason’s smirk is there, clear as day, under the red. Damian can’t see it, but he knows the shape. “I know.” 

Jason’s hands are on his hips, and then he drops to his knees, and presses his head to Damian’s thigh. They stay there, a long moment, and Damian fishes the comm out of his ear, and drops it. He takes a blade from his utility belt, and slices into his suit, where the trackers are, and cuts those out, too.

Jason looks up, watches, his eyes bright.

And then he tugs Jason to stand. Presses their foreheads together. “Come on, then,” he says. “We have other matters to see to tonight.”

Jason’s laugh is dark; his hand tangles in Damian’s, and follows him out of the warehouse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Officially the filthiest thing I've written. 
> 
> Comments always appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> Mici you say what is your obsession with muzzles
> 
> tumblr over at eggsac, mostly I've been reblogging my huge Robin problem


End file.
